Supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's Complexity Science for the Real World initiative
Institute for Social Change
Part of the group ranked joint first for sociological research in the 2008 RAE, the ISC is an interdisciplinary social science research centre that conducts empirical research into the causes and consequences of social change in the areas of inequality, immigration, religion, the workplace and political and civic engagement.
Centre for Policy Modelling
The Centre for Policy Modelling is a research centre of the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School. Its area of research is the complex intersection of sociology and distributed artificial intelligence - both applying the technique of AI/ML to understanding social phenomena as well as applying ideas from the social sciences to the organisation of distributed computational systems. Formed in 1992, it has developed a world-wide reputation in the area of agent-based social simulation. For more details of its activities see its website
Theoretical Physics Group
Alan McKane leads the complexity science initiative of the TPG. He has been working on the theory of complex systems for over ten years, principally applying the ideas and techniques of statistical physics to problems in the physical, biological and social sciences. He was part of the EPSRC ‘NANIA’ project, which developed ways of relating models at different levels of abstraction. He has also been the co-organiser of two EPSRC Summer Schools on Complexity as well as many shorter meetings and lecture courses on the subject. His research has involved many aspects of complexity theory. He suggested the use of co-evolving networks, which was used originally to model food webs (Drossel, Higgs & McKane, 2001) but is now being adopted by other researchers in other fields.
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