This document answers the question
"why should I be interested in complexity and how is Complexity important and relevant to me?"

The format is a list of professions and domains with examples of complexity uses in those fields.

Politics

Predicting and influencing Opinion spread within population

Predicting and influencing Elections dynamics
in presence of multiple issues and interest groups.

Multi-Agent modeling in (inter-)national conflict prevention and resolution

Political Campaign evaluation and design

Achieving Global propagation of Ideas through

Appropriately designed local individual interactions

Managing Social stability and change,
prediction and control of social disturbances

Understanding and using the role of inhomogeneity, leaders
and leadership clustering in the stability and resilience of minority opinion

Policy (in agriculture, health, economics, industrial, research)

Introducing and encouraging the spread of new, good practices

Designing incentives for the emergence of avalanches of adoption

Management of Research practices and of their public perception

Monitoring and (Self-)Regulating Research interest avalanches

Prediction of outcome of social policies (retirement, subsidies) etc

Evaluating and optimizing in advance new traffic arrangements, etc

Governance, Operation research and military applications

Simulation and analysis of multi-agent operation theaters

Mass Phenomena

Prediction and design of Human mass motion in constrained spaces.

Assist (adaptive / dynamic) architectural design
by modeling peoples’ behavior within it.

Avoid macroscopic catastrophes in stadiums, theaters, roads.

Predicting, avoiding and solving Traffic jams (using e.g. phase transitions).

Predicting likelihood for revolutions and managing their unfolding.

Design macroscopic collective effects induced by

local individual behavior rules (e.g. “Mexican waves” in stadiums).

Design social collective coherent behavior
(e.g. emergence of hand-clap coherence)

Management

Generating automatically New Creative ideas
(through algorithms acting on the relevant conceptual connections)

Generating New Products
(by Combining, Connecting and Re-Structuring their Parts / Properties)

Predicting outcome of Sales campaigns

(by measuring the Fractal space-time character of the initial sales clusters).

Optimizing the scheduling and content of ad campaigns.

Predicting and controlling market instabilities

(Macroscopic space / time correlations in sales fluctuations)

Controlling catastrophic sales waves (Tamaguchi effect)

Understanding and influencing product Flips and Flops
(using market percolation as phase transition concepts).

Understanding and Controlling marketing effects
(second comer success, initial decline before take-off, etc )

Optimizing Intra- and Inter- organization interaction networks

Relation topology-functionality

Economics

Predict and influence the dynamics of economic growth

Role of steady stream of local singular events
(as opposed to steady uniform conditions)
in determining the macroscopic long range outcome.

Role of local factors fluctuations in establishing the long range steady regime.

Role of globalization on Sustainability, Stability, Welfare and wealth distribution

Formulating recommendations on global and local policies.

Planning and evaluation of the effects of economic regulations

Financial markets

Predicting likelihood of (and preventing) Booms and crashes

Predicting likelihood and preparing policies for Extreme events

Risk estimation

Anticipating the formation of Herds and dealing with the ensuing anomalies

Evaluating and insuring financial markets stability through acting on
social wealth distribution

Predicting and evaluation of the effects of modifying Markets regulation rules

Collective effects in supply-networks dynamics;
preventing emergence of (and controlling) monopoles

Evaluating Credit networks stability and likelihood of bankruptcy avalanches

Customer / credit individual and collective profiling

Social Sciences

Understanding and Influencing Emergence and Structure of Institutions

Estimating the Stability of social structures

Evaluating Information flow and Optimal Streaming it within organizations

Pairing (customers to producers, learners to teachers, interest groups, pairs)

Stopping Social ills
Understanding and controlling the Propagation of Social ills
(and negative practices: smoking, alcohol, drugs)

Fighting Electronic Viruses with propagating anti-viruses

Evaluating the risk of (and avoiding) Epidemics

Containing and shrinking violence in urban neighborhoods

Evaluating and limiting terrorism support networks and groups.

Characterizing and preventing the background for terrorist support

Robotics

traffic phase transitions:

predicting, avoiding and solving traffic jams

(by spatially distributed local actions).

“dividuals”: physically disjoint but highly integrated collectives of agents

highly interactive and self-organized flocks of simple (aerial) vehicles

design of evolutionary and adaptive hardware

decentralized dynamical communication networks
(e.g. portable telephones connecting directly to neighboring peers)

evolving self-teaching robots

Communication Networks

Predicting the emergence and (Self-) Regulating Peer-to-Peer networks

Evaluating and managing internet bandwidth, traffic, resilience and safety

WWW structure: identification , monitoring and intervention in

virtual societies dynamics and structure

WWW understanding as an emergent form of intelligence.

Uncovering its knowledge contents beyond the sum of its components

Introspective web: using the communication networks to study themselves

(by distributing software agents throughout them)

Wikipedia as a communal / dynamical conceptual network;

Characterising Community emergent psyche

Collective development of Multi-Author , multi-item knowledge bases

Monitoring and Influencing Community interest cascades

Infrastructure networks: Electricity, Gas, water

Preventing and Dealing with bottom-to-top avalanches of failures

Regulating global demand / supply fluctuations

(by suggesting appropriate simple individual rules)

Modeling and Controlling the stability of interacting Networks of Networks

Psychology

Promoting Self stability and self development changes
by acting on individual simple mental processes

Self healing of integrated behavior by acting on individual psychic elements.

Analyzing and interpreting children drawings;
Application to prevention and therapeutic uses.

Predicting, and correcting visual illusions
by understanding what algorithms the perceptual system
uses to integrate the individual sensors’ signals

Using them to maximize natural-feeling of artificial reality

Algorithms that increase the esthetics of pictures, etc.

Marriage counseling problems

Cognition:

creative idea generators that beat humans

identifying the dynamics of conceptual connections and
of mental state evolution

monitoring and influencing mental dynamics

Ecology -

population / species survival in shrinking / hostile habitat

Desertification dynamics and Desert reclaim

Evaluating and influencing emergence and survival of species

Emergence and resilience of cells / life

Role of localization in the resilience of life

Biology

genetic networks; from microscopic dynamics to systemic properties

pattern emergence within organisms and within populations

large fluctuations, singular events and species survival

Role of intermittent dynamics in the normal functioning and diagnostic
of the immune, perceptual and vegetative systems.

Immunology:

explaining the high specificity of the immune reaction
in terms of feedback networks;
diagnostic and healing of auto-immune diseases

Understanding and enhancing the immune self and its informatics basis

Explaining and achieving defense specificity out of diffuse affinity

selecting optimal vaccine elements among the antigen components

Health:

Streaming and Coordinating health checks and operations
within large health organizations

Coordinating measurements and interventions
at the individual and at the community levels.

Understanding and acting on health conditions at the multi-agent level

Understanding and treating global disease dynamics
in terms of collective antigen and antibody phenomena.

Humanities:

Literature

Stories structure: uncovering hidden / inexplicit information

in literary works.

Dynamical Distributed Network ontology

Understanding how we really generate, organize and communicate
knowledge at the individual and collective levels

Optimizing and personalizing Knowledge transfer and documentation:
generation, retrieval, teaching and learning

(Intra and inter) human dynamics in terms of discrete elements processes

Epistemological aspects: Non-Markovian Causality ,