The Internet is, perhaps, the largest and most complex human artifact ever created, encompassing billions of technologies, organizations, and human users worldwide. It operates simultaneously on several interacting time scales -- from slow processes, such as hardware development, to data transport occurring at the speed of light. In the third ...

Threats are ubiquitous in complex systems: biology is rife with viruses, parasites, and bacteria; social networks abound with bullies; and international relations are stymied by rogue nations. In the second of three lectures, Stephanie Forrest proposes that understanding how complex systems generally resolve threats might suggest ways to address threats ...

Software -- used today for everything from shopping and banking to streaming movies -- shapes our daily experience. The software industry contributes billions of dollars annually to the U.S. economy and employs millions of Americans. Programmers like to think of software as the carefully crafted product of intelligent design. In ...

Since the mid 1970s, cancer has been described as a process of Darwinian evolution, with somatic cellular selection and evolution being the fundamental processes leading to malignancy and its many manifestations (neoangiogenesis, evasion of the immune system, metastasis, and resistance to therapies). Historically, little attention has been placed on applications ...

Is the human conscience led by the head or the heart? Is the moral progress we have enjoyed – religious freedom, the abolition of slavery, anti-war movements, civil, women’s, and gay rights – a gift of empathy and emotion, or of reason and logic? Psychologist and author Steven Pinker and ...