>> DIEP seminars and talks - 2026
DIEP is a broad interdisciplinary endeavour with the aim of bringing scientists together and fostering collaborations in order to progress the science of emergence. For this purpose, DIEP organises a wide variety of events, ranging from brainstorming sessions, community building events, workshops, conferences, public lectures, technical talks and cocktail parties. Regular events include workshops and DIEP seminars (see also the events page).
To register for the DIEP seminars taking place every Thursday please fill out the form here. See full calendar of events here.
See recordings of all talks here. To access older seminars you can check the seminar archives of 2018/2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
>> DIEP Seminar: Bernat Corominas Murtra (University of Graz )
Time, Synchrony and Embryogenesis | 11am, 26th of March 2026
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Clocks are mechanisms that display a (presumed) periodic internal dynamical behaviour enabling us to measure time. Living beings have plenty of mechanisms that metaphorically ressemble the functioning of a clock, like hormone cycles, heart beats or metabolic and cell division rates. These mechanisms define, each, a biological time, being the cell division rate among the most commonly accepted representatives. The observed biological timing is not totally arbitrary: it must display some alignment to physical time due to selective pressures and fundamental constraints coming from physics and chemistry. What is this relation? What are the consequences of this relation with respect to other, apparently distant properties, like the topology or the material properties of the living tissues? In this talk I will revise recent surprising advances in the mapping between biological and physical time in early embryonic development stages of metazoans, for which we demonstrated that it follows a universal hyperbolic law. I will continue showing how one can establish a surprising causal link between time (a)synchronies and the material responses of the embryonic tissues, a mechanism key for the emergence of the complex geometries that will further define the different parts of the organism.
>> DIEP Seminar: Muhittin Mungan (Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf)
Self-Organization and Memory: From Driven Disordered Materials to Living Matter | 11am, 12th of March 2026
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Disordered materials subject to a fluctuating environment can self-organize into a complex history-dependent response, retaining a memory of the driving. In sheared amorphous solids, self-organization is established by the emergence of a persistent system of mechanical instabilities that can repeatedly be triggered by the driving, leading to a state of high mechanical reversibility. As a result of self-organization, the response of the system becomes correlated with the dynamics of its environment.
These correlations furnish a mechanism by which a system can sense and respond to its environment. In fact, they can be regarded as the system establishing a representation of its environment in the sense that the dynamics of system and environment mirror each other. Such forms of self-organization emerge across a wide variety of soft matter systems, suggesting that they are generic and hence may depend very little on the underlying specifics. In his talk Prof. Muhittin Mungan will describe self-organization and memory formation in a model disordered material, the sheared amorphous solid. Then, the seminar will turn to the question of what self-organization in driven disordered materials can teach us about how simple organisms lacking a brain, such as bacteria, may sense and adapt to their changing environment.
>> DIEP Seminar: Jordi Bascompte (University of Zurich)
The emergence of eukaryotes as an evolutionary algorithmic phase transition | 11am, 5th of March 2026
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For almost half the history of life on Earth, the complexity of all organisms was limited to that of simple prokaryotic cells such as contemporary bacteria. The process by which genes are activated was entirely regulated by proteins. This set up a limit on cellular complexity, as finding even larger proteins became computationally unfeasible. The eukaryotic cell-characterized by membrane-bound nucleus and organelles-emerged as a compromise between a conserved process of gene growth and a change in genetic regulation, which incorporated noncoding sequences. This major evolutionary event, which unlocked the path towards multicellular organisms, can be understood as an algorithmic phase transition equivalent to that of certain search algorithms.
>> DIEP Seminar: Max Rietkerk (Utrecht University)
Resilience pathways for ambiguous tipping points | 11am, 26th of February 2026
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First developed in ecology, the concept of tipping points between alternative stable states and their early-warning indicators has more recently been applied to major climate system components. However, these indicators are often statistically and interpretively ambiguous, a pattern evident in research on the Amazon rainforest, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), and the Greenland Ice Sheet. Here, early-warning signals have been interpreted as indicating that these systems are approaching catastrophic tipping points, while the uncertainties surrounding these interpretations have remained underemphasized.
Another notable example is the reported bimodality in tree-cover distributions across the Congo Basin, the largest rainforest in Africa. This early-warning indicator has been used to infer that the whole Congo, though currently forested, may be bistable with savanna and at risk of a large-scale shift. Yet evidence suggests that any such tipping dynamics, if present at all, operate only at much smaller spatial scales (<10 × 10 km) and do not characterize the Congo as a whole. The rationale behind this reassessment is relevant for other climate system elements as well.
Recognizing these ambiguities is crucial for responsible science communication: early-warning assessments for tipping points should explicitly convey their uncertainties to maintain transparency and avoid perceptions of alarmism. Nevertheless, uncertainty about tipping points does not lessen the urgency of climate action, given the well-documented impacts of ongoing climate change. The proposed framework of resilience pathways offers a constructive way to incorporate such ambiguities, supporting climate policies that remain evidence-based and adaptive to future scenarios.
>> DIEP Seminar: Merijn Moody (DIEP)
Evaluating Scientific Understanding and Creativity in LLMs | 11am, 19th of February 2026
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A major debate in the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence is whether LLMs and other AI systems are merely "stochastic parrots" repeating training data, or if they are capable of genuine creativity and understanding. While Large Language Models are increasingly used in research, current benchmarks often fail to measure whether a model truly understands physics and is capable of creativity, or is simply memorizing facts. In this talk, a new benchmark framework is proposed to measure the scientific understanding and creativity of LLMs. In this framework, models are tested on tasks ranging from standard textbook problems to complex coding challenges, such as the classification of particle collision events. Finally, a collaborative approach is proposed for the continuous generation of new tasks to ensure the lasting relevance of the benchmark.
>> DIEP Seminar: Pádraig MacCarron (University of Limerick)
Myths, maths, and missing data | 11am, 12th of February 2026
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A key concept in complex systems is the idea of emergent properties. Complex systems have a wide range of applications outside of the realm of tradition science. In this talk, complex networks are used to study shared-cultural literature.
Every human culture we have encountered has its own myths, epics, and legends. Hence, mythology can be viewed as an emergent property of a culture. However, the vast majority of myths and epics have been lost. For example, in the Greek Trojan Cycle, only two of eight epics have survived in full: the Iliad and the Odyssey. This talk will look at ancient-Greek, medieval-Irish, and some modern literature to assess what impact the loss of data has on the social networks extracted from those corpora. By using modern literature with relatively complete social networks, we can attempt to quantify how many characters and interactions have been lost, and methods to make predictions to mitigate data loss will be discussed.
>> DIEP Seminar: Fernando Rosas (University of Sussex)
Mirroring the world: How symmetry shapes hierarchical beliefs | 11am, 5th of February 2026
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Many systems exhibit nested emergent layers with their own rules and regularities, and our knowledge about them seems naturally organised around these levels. In this talk, I will put forward a formal approach to capture this correspondence, linking hierarchical structures in objective processes to Bayesian beliefs held by observers. For doing this, I will first present a framework to formalise the existence of self-contained levels via the concepts of informational, causal, and computational closure. Then, I will introduce a formal approach to world modelling, examining what it means to build an efficient internal representation of an perception-action loop. Finally, we will put these ideas together to identify equivariance of objective dynamics as a sufficient condition for the existence of multi-level beliefs. These ideas will be illustrated by a range of examples covering statistical mechanics and computational neuroscience.
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>> DIEP Seminar: Martijn Gösgens (University of Twente)
Geometry hinders the formation of consensus in asynchronous majority dynamics | 11am, 29th of January 2026
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Dr Martijn Gösgens will investigate a model of opinion dynamics where vertices asynchronously announce opinions based on their private opinion and on the previously announced opinions of their neighbors. The focus is on understanding how the structure of the underlying graph influences the likelihood of reaching consensus on the true opinion. Previous work proved that for sufficiently sparse, connected expander graphs, this process terminates in consensus on the true opinion with high probability. In this work, there will be shown that when the underlying graph has geometric structure, the process is likely to terminate in disconsensus. Specifically, it willbe proven that for a one-dimensional Random Geometric Graph (RGG) of n vertices with expected degree o(√n), the process ends in disconsensus with high probability. Numerical experiments indicate that this phenomenon persists in higher-dimensional RGGs. Instead of a global consensus, there can be observed that the geometry leads to local consensuses. For dense RGGs, it will be proven that the process has a non-vanishing probability of ending in consensus on the false opinion.
>> DIEP Seminar: Alessandro Corbetta (TU Eindhoven)
Understanding pedestrian physics: from large-scale measurements, physics-based modeling and generative AI | 11am, 22nd of January 2026
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Achieving a quantitative understanding and modelling of the dynamics of pedestrian crowds is not only a primary societal need, but also an outstanding fundamental challenge connected with the statistical physics of active flowing matter. Developments in automated vision over the last 15 years have given us increasing possibilities to measure the crowd behaviour at larger and larger spatial scales and with finer and finer details. Data acquisition in real-life with 24/7/365 schedules in public places enables datasets including millions of trajectories, resolving common and rare events. These open big-data investigations aiming at statistical features emerging from universal physical properties of pedestrian dynamics.
Alessandro will briefly review the work conducted over the last decade and the general trend of the scientific community. Then, Prof. Corbetta will focus on the challenge of modeling crowd dynamics targeting quatitative accuracy in statistical sense, from dilute to dense. The discussion will then follow recent and in-development models hinging on (functional) Langevin equations and variational approaches whose stationary measures manage to reproduce the experimental ensembles. Lastly, the participants will learn about recent applications of generative autoregressive AI to extract n-body interactions from massive data.
>> DIEP Seminar: Mauricio del Razo (Freie Universität Berlin)
Entropy production of biochemical processes with applications to enzyme kinetics | 11am, 15th of January 2026
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Entropy production of biochemical processes provides a tool to quantify irreversibility and energetic costs in living systems, from molecular reactions to cellular-scale organization. The first part of this talk extends stochastic thermodynamics from well-mixed chemical master equations to spatially resolved reaction–diffusion systems, where reactive events are coupled to transport and local fluctuations. Building on this framework, the second part of the talk applies this results to spatially inhomogeneous single-enzyme kinetics driven by chemical baths, yielding potential mechanisms to explain biophysical relevant phenomena such as enhanced diffusion. The last part shows how recent field-theoretic and quantum-method formulations of stochastic reaction–diffusion systems can be harnessed to construct stochastic thermodynamic theory for mesoscopic coarse-grained descriptions that recovers well-known macroscopic results. This novel perspective yields practical and numerical tools for inferring energetic and thermodynamic properties biochemical networks from reduced, experimentally realistic descriptions, while making explicit the information loss and scale dependence of entropy production.
