The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP, Trieste, Italy) is organizing a School and Conference on Fundamental Aspects of Complexity, to be held at the ICTP from 6 to 10 September 2004.  

THE ACTIVITY IS JOINTLY ORGANIZED WITH DYGLAGEMEM EUROPEAN NETWORK AND CO-SPONSORED BY STIPCO EUROPEAN NETWORK.

One of the main trends of statistical physics in the last two decades has been the emergence of new concepts and techniques to study disordered systems.  These are systems whose microscopic components (for instance spins, particles or more structured objects) are heterogeneous, generally because they are frozen in some random environments.  The (still partial) understanding of such systems, joined to the progresses in the study of out-of-equilibrium dynamics, has defined some new areas where statistical physics can potentially turn out to be very useful.  This activity focuses on the use of statistical physics to study complex systems in realms that are at the borderline of physics.

There is a number of research areas outside the traditional frontiers of physics where the application of these methods looks particularly promising.  They all relate in some way to the collective behaviour of heterogeneous agents, where “agents” can be as diverse as logical constraints in optimization problems or error correcting codes, proteins in molecular networks, or economic agents.  The coherence of our approach derives from the concepts and techniques which are used and from the types of questions that we will address in all these different topics.

The School and Conference aims at bringing together statistical physicists involved in interdisciplinary research and experts from mathematics, computer science, bio-informatics, economics and game theory who share an interest in the same problems.

Scientists and students from all countries that are members of the UN, UNESCO or IAEA may attend the activities.  The main purpose of the Centre is to help research workers from developing countries through a programme of training activities within a framework of international cooperation.  However scientists from developed countries are also welcome to attend.  As the activity will be conducted in English, participants should have an adequate working knowledge of that language.  Applicants to the School requesting financial support should not be older than 45 at the time of the activity.  As a rule, travel and subsistence expenses of the participants are borne by their home institutions.  However, limited funds are available for applicants to be selected by the organizers.  As scarcity of funds allows travel to be granted only in a few exceptional cases, every effort should be made by candidates to secure support for their fare (or at least half-fare) from their home country.  Such financial support is available only to those attending the entire School and Conference.  There is no registration fee for attendance.

The closing date for the receipt of requests for participation is

30 April 2004

Candidates should complete, sign and return the Application Form obtainable through this WEB Page. The Application Form, with a list of recent publications, should be sent to:

the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics
School and Conference on Fundamental Aspects of Complexity (smr.1578)
c/o Ms. Nicoletta Ivanissevich
Strada Costiera 11
I-34014 Trieste, Italy

Telefax:  +39-040-224163
E-mail:  smr1578@ictp.trieste.it	 
Telephone:  +39-040-2240383

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 LIST OF SPEAKERS (last updating: 10 September 2004)

D. Achlioptas, Microsoft Corporation
M. Alava, Helsinki University of Technology
G. Bianconi, the Abdus Salam ICTP
G. Biroli, CEA Saclay	
S. Boettcher, Emory University, Atlanta
A.J. Bray, University of Manchester
N. Brunel, Université René Descartes – Paris 5
Z. Burda, Jagellonian University, Krakow
A. Cavagna, Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
E. Domany, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot	
O. Dubois, Université Paris 6	
I. Giardina, Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"	
A. Goerdt, Technische Universität Chemnitz	
S. Kirkpatrick, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
J. Kurchan, ESPCI, Paris	 
M. Lässig, Universität zu Köln
E. Marinari, Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
O.C. Martin, LPTMS, Orsay
S. Mertens, Universität Magdeburg
A. Montanari, ENS, Paris
M.A. Moore, University of Manchester
M. Müller, Rutgers University
J.-P. Nadal, ENS, Paris
D. Sherrington, University of Oxford
F.L. Toninelli, Universität Zürich
F. Vega-Redondo, Universidad de Alicante
J. Yedidia, MERL , Cambridge, USA