“Increasingly we have global transportation, global communication … and that means we have things that propagate across the world,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, told dozens of faculty, students and administrators who gathered for the event. The study of complex systems can reveal trends, help forecast and avert crises and identify connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena.

The Center for Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems, or CoCo, claims faculty participants from about 15 departments on campus. The researchers study networks ranging from the stock market to the brain, using mathematical modeling to understand and predict their behavior.

“If we want to address the most pressing challenges of our society, we need to bring people of different disciplines together,” said Donald Nieman, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “CoCo fits really wonderfully into this paradigm.”

Hiroki Sayama, CoCo director, is an associate professor in Binghamton’s department of systems science and industrial engineering. He’s also the author of a new Open SUNY textbook titled “Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems.”

At Binghamton, CoCo, which began as an informal group in 2007, has held a seminar series for years. It was formally recognized as an Organized Research Center this summer. Sayama said the researchers have established three key research thrusts:

• Agent-based modeling of socioeconomic dynamics of Greater Binghamton
• Design and evaluation of adaptive power systems
• Applications to social and psychological processes

CoCo also led the establishment of an advanced graduate certificate program in complex systems science and engineering at Binghamton.

Bar-Yam’s talk, which touched on topics such as Ebola and the Arab Spring, included illustrations of how complex systems science can help world leaders, non-government organizations and public health officials anticipate crises. He drew connections between American policies on corn ethanol and global food prices, then used graphs to show the link between those food prices and civil unrest worldwide.

As he shifted his focus to ebola, Bar-Yam noted that pathogen evolution has been disrupted by our global transportation networks. In the past, a virus that was overly aggressive — essentially, one that killed people too quickly — would eventually die out for lack of victims. Now, an aggressive pathogen can “succeed” by jumping to a new location. Statistical models, he argued, aren’t up to the task of predicting these jumps. Indeed, Bar-Yam said, people may be blind to the unreasonable risk of a virus like ebola because of their reliance on statistics.

Bar-Yam’s lecture wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. He also shared some anecdotes about a project involving the use of Twitter to analyze people’s locations and moods in various New York City neighborhoods. “We discovered to our surprise that people in Central Park are happier,” he said, to loud laughter from the audience.

CoCo’s seminar series continues throughout the semester. For details on upcoming lectures and information about the center’s work, visit http://coco.binghamton.edu.

That’s according to a new Binghamton University study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Binghamton researcher Hiroki Sayama and four students at nearby Maine-Endwell High School in upstate New York, conducted a survey of the school’s junior class. The students were asked about their friendships, and the researchers constructed a series of social networks focusing on acquaintances, friends and best friends.

The student researchers obtained the GPAs of every student in the 160-member class and developed a hypothesis: Students whose friends had better grades than they did had a better chance of improving their academic performance than students whose friends weren’t doing as well in school.

In the second year of the study, the students ― then seniors — demonstrated that this was indeed the case. “If your friends had a higher GPA than yours,” Sayama said, “you have a better chance of improving your GPA — and vice versa.”

Sayama worked with the students as well as an administrator from the school district. The teenagers proposed the study idea and pursued it even when Sayama explained the challenges inherent in working with human subjects.

“They were so persistent,” he said. “This is their research. I helped with statistical analysis, but they chose the topic and conducted the surveys.” The students, Deanna Blansky, Christina Kavanaugh, Cara Boothroyd and Brianna Benson, are now in college and appear as lead authors on the peer-reviewed research publication, which was conducted with support from the National Science Foundation.

Sayama, a professor and a father, said the study’s findings surprised him. His colleague in the school district, however, seemed to take the results as confirmation of something she had long suspected. The student researchers, who noted that friends had a stronger influence on academic performance than acquaintances or best friends, suggest that the study offers a potential method of predicting student performance.

The scientific community has recently uncovered other examples of so-called “social contagion,” most recently studies showing that your friends’ weight as well as happiness may affect your own.

“Many things are communicated over social ties,” said Sayama, director of Binghamton’s Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems Research Group. “This is one of the first discoveries that shows social contagion might also be taking place in academic performance.”