SCTPLS 36: Guest Speaker Lineup

[Guastello, Stephen]

In case you missed our previous announcements -

The 36th Annual International Conference of the SCTPLS,

July 29th - July 31st, 2026 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC

is pleased to present our guest speakers:

Dr. Mark Shelhamer (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine)

in his presentation entitled:

Preparing for the Unpredictable: Facilitating Multi-System Resilience in Human Spaceflight

Human spaceflight is incredibly complex, and future missions will become more challenging. It will not be sufficient on longer and more ambitious missions simply to ensure that things do not go wrong (risk mitigation); it will also be necessary to provide the tools (tangible and intangible) for the crew and the mission to be resilient – to deal with the unexpected. This takes on increased importance when one recognizes that crews on distant missions will be largely autonomous and independent of help from Earth. We posit that this type of resilience will depend to a great extent on the proper functional integration of many different systems – human health and performance, spacecraft/habitat integrity, mission operations, and many others. These systems must work together synergistically in order to maintain performance and deal with the unexpected. Approaches to this problem can be drawn from the fields of resilience engineering, complex systems, and complex networks. This type of thinking has not yet been applied to human spaceflight in a systematic manner.

And 

Dr. Bruce J. West (University of North Texas and North Carolina State University)

in his presentation entitled:

Complexity Synchronization among and within Organ Networks

Our efforts to explain complex phenomena within the social, physical and life sciences reveal that science itself is fundamentally transdisciplinary. Each of these separate scientific domains blossomed into complexity theory and most recently into complexity synchronization (CS). The science motif of CS is based on the scaling arising from the 1/f-variability in complex dynamic networks and the need for a network-of-networks to exchange information internally during intra-network dynamics and externally during inter-network dynamics. The measure of complexity adopted in this colloquium is the multifractal dimension of a crucial event time series (CETS) generated by an organ network (ON), and the difference in the multifractal dimensions of two ON quantifies the relative complexity between interacting ONs. Information flows from dynamic networks at a higher level of complexity into those at lower levels of complexity, as summarized in the complexity matching effect (CME) and the flow is maximally efficient when the complexities are equal. The functionality of organ-networks (ONs) within the human body are dependent on the level of complexity of those ONs since the complexity determines the information content of an ON's time series. The communication among ONs distributed throughout the human body are made through the exchange of information from one ON to another. In this talk we use the fractal-architecture hypothesis (FAH) along with fractal time to explain how the exchange of information can be optimally efficient in terms of internal information transport and storage, as well as information exchange with other ONs. The complexity of such time series is quantified using their multifractal dimension (MFD), communicating task-related information by means of MFD time series. The theory of scaling statistics is used to explain the source of complexity synchronization (CS) observed in the information exchange among the brain, lungs, and heart. We argue that MFD physiological time series (PTS) is a manifestation of a Law of Multifractal Dimension Synchronization (LMFDS).

These are two presentations you won't want to miss!

Reminders:

The conference registration page is now open. Early bird rates are in effect until July 10, 2026. And, of course, a reminder to submit your abstracts for conference presentations by May 15, 2026.

https://www.societyforchaostheory.org/conf/2026/cfp.cgi

Travel details and local logistics are now available on our conference website, lodging information will be available soon!

societyforchaostheory.org/conf/2026/logistics.cgi

We are looking forward to seeing you all there!

https://www.societyforchaostheory.org/conf/2026/

Cordially yours, the Conference Committee,

Adam Kiefer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Barney Ricca, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

Cortney Armitano-Lago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Stephen Guastello, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI

 

 

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sctpls-group...@umbc.edu.