In this talk I will give an overview of the work of the Complexity and Connection Science Lab at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. I will mainly focus on a method called Transcendental Information Cascades (TICs) that we develop for the study of time-evolving systems through the lens of networks of information recurrences. TICs have been applied to data from the social Web, literature, genomic data and climate data, for example, where we aim to push the boundaries of current understanding of temporal changes. To round the talk off I will provide a perspective of how complexity science might be useful in understanding competing AI systems.

Bio: Markus Luczak-Roesch is an Associate Professor within the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington, Principal Investigator at Te Pūnaha Matatini—New Zealand’s centre for research excellence (CoRE) on complex systems, and currently a Visiting Professor at the L3S Research Centre at the University of Hannover. He obtained his MSc (2008) and my PhD (2014) degrees from Freie Universität  Berlin (Germany) where he also worked as a Lecturer in Computer Science from 2010 to 2013. From 2013 until 2016 he worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton (UK) on the prestigious project "SOCIAM - The Theory and Practice of Social Machines" (https://sociam.org/). He is now leading the Complexity & Connection Science Lab at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include the mathematics of change, particularly change that is a result of rare coincidences, and the unifying mathematical properties of emergence. He has worked and is working on various projects ranging from social systems (e.g. online communities and social movements), to biological systems (e.g. genomics and brain activities), to cultural artefacts (e.g. language, literature, human personality), to numerical systems (e.g. prime numbers), to the Earth system (e.g. climate data).

As a truly transdisciplinary researcher he has published and presented his work at venues in computer science, information systems, psychology, sociology, communications, humanities, education and climate science.