Okay, is this thing on?
Welcome, welcome to Modeling Complex Systems.
This is a topic I am super passionate about
so I hope you'll bear with me
as I share some of my enthusiasm with you all.
I care about modeling complex systems
because I do think it's art.
Complex systems are art
and modeling is a huge part of its craft.
And like a lot of craft courses
this is a class where I'll be sharing some tips
and tricks through videos with you all and readings
but where you'll have to get your hands dirty.
You don't sign up for a pottery class
and don't expect to get dirt on your hands.
And so that's essentially the same thing.
In this video though, no dirty anything.
We'll mostly just introduce who I am
and I hope to set a stage
so that you feel comfortable introducing yourself
in class synchronously
or using whatever message board we use.
And so I'm your host for the semester,
your instructor I should say, Laurent Hebert-Dufresne.
And I'll say that one more time.
It's a hard French name.
I'm from Quebec City, so I'm Laurent Hebert-Dufresne
or you can call me Professor LHD.
They both work if you're not up for the challenge
of French pronunciation.
And I wanna give you a little bit
of background about myself,
hopefully to clear up why I'm so passionate
about this course.
Like I said, modeling complex systems is a craft.
It's my craft, it's how I view the world.
And it wasn't always like that.
So I come from beautiful Quebec City,
one of the best cities in the world,
and I studied physics there.
I did my bachelor, master's, PhD, all in my hometown.
I never had any intention of leaving.
I studied theoretical physics mainly
so statistical physics, the physics of large populations.
So that's stuff like crystals and how a signal propagates
through a medium.
Eventually I realized that some of the tools I were
using were broad mathematical modeling tools
that could be applied to almost anything.
And I had curiosity about almost anything.
So that led me to New Mexico at the Santa Fe Institute
for about three years of postdoctoral work.
There I really indulged myself.
I started studying forest ecology, microbial communities,
political campaigns, misinformation.
I was just trying to see what is it about the world
that I can really capture in all its beauty
through these modeling tools.
So that was that move to New Mexico was around 2014.
And not unlike the time period we're in now,
2014 was some of you might remember the time
of a very large epidemic, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
And so I got very interested in disease propagation,
trying to see if any of the tools I knew,
any of the expertise I had developed
over the years could be useful
to important societal problems.
That led me after this postdoc
to the Institute for Disease Modeling in Seattle.
So the Institute for Disease Modeling is the mathematical
and computational modeling arm of the Gates Foundation.
So there it was the perfect playground
and it's not quite the right word for it
but to see what actual concrete tools can I build
that will be useful in the real world
for actual public health problems.
I did miss academia.
So both the Sante Fe Institute and the Institute
for Disease Modeling are nonprofit research institutions.
And I think I missed the craziness of the classroom.
I'm not sure why.
I also did miss the Northeast.
As I said, I'm from Quebec City, not too far from Vermont.
So that led me in 2018 back in the region
when I joined the Vermont Complex System Center.
And Vermont has been really a new home for me.
It's like being back in my home culture just in English.
But really we have the same passion for the outdoors,
the cheese, the beers, and the maple syrup.
So it just feels great to be here.
And likewise, the Vermont Complex Systems Center has been
a academic and intellectual home for me.
And this course, Modeling Complex Systems,
is one of our flagship class.
It's one of our core courses
for our different graduate programs because I think
that there are two ways really
that you can approach complex systems.
Complex systems, we'll talk about it in the next video
but it's this broad set of systems
and questions and problems that you can ask about the world.
And the way we tend to do it
in a multidisciplinary complexity setting is either
by observing the system through data science
or by trying to explain the system
and its mechanism through modeling.
And so this is half of the equation really
that you're gonna be seeing in this course.