Conference: Modeling Complexity Across Levels: Social Insect Societies As Multilevel Integrated Systems to be held at the Santa Fe Institute, on May 22-26, 2002.

“跨层次的复杂性建模：作为多层次集成系统的社会性昆虫社会。”群居昆虫群落为理解生物复杂性提供了一个“模型系统”。它们是多成分、多层次因果结构的典范。从遗传对神经过程和行为的影响到群体和个体层面的选择效应，所有层次的组织都参与了蚁群、蜜蜂、黄蜂或白蚁行为的产生、维持和调节。最近对复杂系统的研究激增，总的来说，产生了各种新的理论、数学和计算工具，用来模拟空间和时间的动态过程。自组织模型、进化计算、功能基因组学、数据挖掘、多智能体模拟等可以清楚地帮助理解复杂的昆虫社会行为。pi将汇集研究生、博士后和初级教员，他们研究社会昆虫不同层次的组织过程，并开发一些当前的建模方法。本次研讨会的目的是教育下一代研究人员关于行为科学的多层次方法，并加强实证研究与抽象建模工作之间的联系。该研讨会将在圣达菲研究所举行，并以教程的形式进行。也就是说，它将与模型对当前研究问题和数据的实际应用高度互动。pi期望新的合作将从这次研讨会中产生，关于集成模型的概括将被发现，并且这些结果将与更广泛的研究复杂性的科学团体相关。

"Modeling complexity across levels: social insect societies as multilevel integrated systems."Social insect colonies provide a "model system" for understanding biological complexity. They are exemplars of multi-component, multi-level causal structures. All levels of organization are involved in the production, maintenance and modulation of behavior in a colony of ants, bees, wasps or termites from genetic effects on neurological process and behavior to selection effects at the group and individual levels The recent explosion of research on complex systems in general has produced a variety of new theoretical, mathematical and computational tools with which to model spatial and temporal dynamical processes. Models of self-organization, evolutionary computation, functional genomics, data mining, multi-agent simulations, etc. can clearly aid in the understanding of complex social insect behavior. The PIs will bring together graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty members who study processes at different levels of organization of social insects with those developing some of the current array of modeling methods. The purpose of this workshop is to educate the next generation of researchers about multilevel approaches to behavior science, and to tighten the connection between empirical studies and abstract modeling efforts. The workshop will be held at the Santa Fe Institute, and is structured as a tutorial. That is, it will be highly interactive with hands-on applications of the models to current research questions and data. The PIs expect that new collaborations will arise from this workshop, that generalizations about integrating models will be discovered, and that these results will be relevant to a wider scientific community investigating complexity.