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In this edition of the DIEP seminar series, Abel Jansma, fellow at the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena, will propose a new way to derive and estimate higher-order interactions in complex systems, based on the notion of a mereology.
Event details of The Mereology of Higher-order Interactions
Date
27 February 2025
Time
11:00 -12:00
Room
Second-floor library

Title

The mereology of higher-order

Abstract

A mereology is a partial order that describes a hierarchy of scales, and it turns out that committing to a mereology fixes all higher-order interactions through the Möbius inversion theorem. Abel will first show that this procedure reproduces many well-known quantities from physics, biology, chemistry, game theory, and AI. He will then demonstrate how to use the framework to derive new quantities, focusing on decompositions in information theory and interventional causality, and present a new way to calculate renormalised couplings. 

About the speaker

Abel Jansma is a fellow at the DIEP where he works on the foundations and applications of emergence. He was trained as an artist and theoretical physicist in the Netherlands, but obtained a PhD in biomedical AI from the University of Edinburgh where he studied the relationship between gene regulation and cell identity. As a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences he started working on higher-order information theory, which led to his current line of research.

If you wish to attend this seminar online, please send an email to f.a.nobregasantos@uva.nl to receive the zoom-link.