The Blanes Center for Advanced Studies (CEAB) hosted the 13th Complexitat Day, the annual meeting of Complexitat.cat and the leading gathering of the Catalan scientific network dedicated to the study of complex systems. Held over two days, the event combined training, scientific exchange, and interdisciplinary discussion around phenomena in which multiple variables interact simultaneously, ranging from cellular populations to ecosystems, including artificial intelligence and urban networks.
The event, organized by the Catalan Network for the Study of Complex Systems (Complexitat.cat), took place on 25 and 26 May at CEAB’s headquarters in Blanes.
The first day, designed as a preparatory session for students, included a training workshop led by Joan Garriga (CEAB) on understanding and exploring high-dimensional complex systems, followed by a second session by Camille Simon Chane (visiting researcher at CEAB) on the practical use of established deep learning models with real-world data. It has also included a special data collection activity in nearby ecological environments that has been carried out at the Marimurtra Botanical Garden.
The main conference day, held on 26 May, featured three keynote lectures and several blocks of short presentations. The keynote speakers were Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo (Pompeu Fabra University), Pablo Almaraz (ICMAN-CSIC), and Elena Casacuberta (Institute of Evolutionary Biology, CSIC, Barcelona). Their talks addressed, respectively, social interactions in cellular populations, the relationship between complexity, epistemology, and reality, and the role of a broad phenotypic landscape in the transition toward multicellularity.
The main programme also included presentations by Manuel Ruiz-Botella, Axel Masó-Puidellosas, Blai Vidiella, Elena G. de Lamo, Giulio Tirabassi, Alejandro García Matarredona, and Cristina Bustos, as well as two poster sessions, networking spaces for knowledge exchange, and the Complexitat.cat General Assembly.
Complexitat Day once again stood out for its strong interdisciplinarity, bringing together experts in fields such as cellular biology, synthetic molecule generation, the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, information transmission in animal groups, ecological community analysis, language complexity, and urban network studies. Diverse topics connected by a clear common thread: complex systems.
The event highlighted the key role of complexity science as a shared framework for addressing very different problems that nonetheless follow the same logic of interdependence.
The event organizers emphasized the importance of having spaces like this one, which foster knowledge exchange and collaborative work among researchers from different disciplines in order to advance scientific understanding.
