What We Do
We develop conceptual frameworks, mathematical models, and applied cases of phenomena where the reductionist paradigm fails due to the systemic nature of the object of study. Of special interest are interdisciplinary phenomena with several entities and complex contextual interactions, such as metabolic and ecological systems, human-environment relations, socio-technological adaptations, and creativity-able systems.
We meet every second week since August 2021! Check our calendar of activities here
We embody self-organization as a research group:
The group is self-organized. We try to minimize hierarchies at the decision-making level. The operation of the group is mostly done by students who coordinate meetings, summaries, questions, projects, etc. We regularly run seminars to know more about interesting topics from people in our network. Various of the outreach activities of CLEA (conferences, workshops, seminars) emerge from this group. You can see a list of our past activities at the bottom of the page (watch our invited seminars here).
International and interdisciplinary by default:
This group exists under the supervision of Francis Heylighen, scientific director of CLEA, and it is led by Tomas Veloz and Prof. Christian Jendreiko (Faculty of Design, HSD University of Applied Sciences, Duesseldorf, Germany). The group collaborates with reserarchers from multiple countries and research fields.
Senior members:
- Prof. Diederik Aerts (CLEA, Belgium)
- Dr. Vincenzo de Florio (CLEA, Belgium)
- Liubov Tupkina (CRI-Paris, France)
- Marc Santolini (CRI-Paris, France)
- Past senior members
- Prof. Peter Dittrich (BioSystems Analysis Group, Jena Center for BioInformatics, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany)
- Prof. Jorge Soto Andrade (Universidad de Chile)
- Prof. Aura Reggiani (University of Bologna, Italy)
- Stan Bundervoet (CLEA, Belgium)
Students: Click here for detailed student descriptions and their roles in the group
- Matthew McCarthy (VUB, Belgium)
- Floor Schukking (VUB, Belgium & University of Utrecht, the Netherlands)
- Marcus Wetzler (Berlin University of the Arts, Germany)
- Gabriel Herrera (Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana, Chile/Universidad de la República, Uruguay)
- Olha Sobetska (University of Leipzig, Germany)
- Fabricio Moreno (Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla, Mexico)
- Ph.D.(c). Daniela Flores (Universidad de Chile)
- Ph.D.(c). Tajana Reznić Brenko (Singidunum University, Serbia)
History and Motivation
The Centre Leo Apostel has been involved in the development of interdisciplinary research for more than 25 years. In the last years, due to the acquired grants and the postdoctoral researchers involved in these projects, the collaboration along the lines of interdisciplinary complex systems modeling has steadily grown. In particular, the framework of Chemical Organization Theory (COT), developed in the mid 2000’s, has caught the attention and has been applied in CLEA for nearly 10 years, and is central to the past CLEA research grant “THE ORIGINS OF GOAL-DIRECTEDNESS: A FORMAL SCENARIO BASED ON CHEMICAL ORGANIZATION THEORY AND CYBERNETICS” (a.k.a. Origins grant), funded by the Templeton Foundation between December 2020 and October 2023 (whose co-PI’s were Francis Heylighen, and Tomas Veloz), which helped us to develop a scenario for the self-organization of goal-directedness from a systemic perspective, applying COT as a systemic modeling framework.
The Origins grant involved a work-package related to goal-directedness in creativity. In this vein, and in coincidence with previous exchanges around the application of Systemic Modeling for creative processes between Dr. Tomas Veloz, Dr. Vincenzo de Florio, Stan Bundervoet, Prof. Christian Jendreiko and his students, started the systemic modeling group as a parallel project involving teaching and research of systemic modeling applied to design and arts has been in course since May 2021.
The latter efforts started attracting students and researchers from various areas such as urban planning, cognitive science, computational biology, interdisciplinary studies, complex systems modeling, and so on. Therefore, the SYMP group became a venue to foster interdisciplinarity with a strong scientific character, giving a chance to students to collaborate and exchange knowledge relevant for their theses, as well as being in touch with experts on a regular basis.
List of Events Organized by SYMP
2024, Seminar on Thermodynamics and Information of Metabolism
2023, Workshop on Artificial Intuition
2023, Workshop on Machine Life Harmony
2022, Reaction Network Modeling Course (in Spanish, at UTEM, Chile)
2021 (ongoing) Invited Seminars
2021, Chemical Organization Theory and Music
2019, Process-based Modeling, ALIFE19
Want to see a short intro?