DR MARKUS LUCZAK-ROESCH
BIO
I am an Associate Professor within the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington and an Associate Investigator at Te Pūnaha Matatini—New Zealand’s centre for research excellence (CoRE) on complex systems. I am leading the Complexity & Connection Science Lab that brings together students and researchers to work on theories and methods to understand the structures and dynamics of complex systems, and to develop computational tools that securely and meaningfully augment human intelligence.
My curiosity is around the mathematics of change and in particular of change that is a result of rare coincidences. Change happens everywhere and all the time – in biological systems in social systems, in the economy, even in very basic every day situations. Sometimes we have the ability to anticipate or predict change, because we understand well the likelihood of the underlying events happening individually and them happening in a particular orchestration. But then there are events that are rare and have potentially never happened together with particular other events. Yet they change the overall system significantly and persistently. This property of most so-called complex systems is also known as emergence. So I ask questions like: What are the unifying mathematical properties of emergence? Does emergence happen similarly across different systems we can find in our world? Can we improve resilience and response to changes when we gain a better formal understanding of emergence?
My enthusiasm for this line of work originates from the early days of my computer science PhD research, where I investigated RDF data repositories that evolve aligned with the emergent changes in how people use (i.e. query) them. Today the systems in which I study emergence range from social systems (e.g. online communities and social movements), to biological systems (e.g. bacteria and brain activities), to cultural artefacts (e.g. language, literature, human personality), to numerical systems (e.g. prime numbers), to weather (e.g. climate change).
DEGREES
- Dr. rer. nat. (PhD) – Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany15 Jan 2008 – 14 Feb 2014
- Dipl.-Inform. (MSc) – Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany15 Oct 2001 – 9 Sep 2007
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