I hope to bring my model one step further and apply it to real data. There are different challenges to achieve this, but we already have some ideas to overcome them.
Gioia Boschi
25 March 2021
Gioia Boschi awarded Bronze for Disordered Systems presentation at STEM for Britain
Gioia, a CANES PhD student in the Disordered Systems group, has been awarded a Bronze medal at STEM for Britain in recognition of the excellence of her research on modelling the emergence of collective memory in societies.
STEM for Britain is an annual major scientific poster competition and exhibition organised by the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee during British Science Week, with the aim of supporting and promoting promising early career researchers. The prestigious national poster competition has been held in Parliament since 1997, but was hosted online this year.
Gioia’s research was conducted in collaboration with Reimer Kuehn, Professor of Statistical Physics and Chiara Cammarota, former Lecturer at King's, in the Department of Mathematics. Her presentation on the subject of ‘Opinion Dynamics and Collective Memory’ was based on theoretical research as to how social interactions and future people’s reactions can be shaped by a society’s history. She explained:
On the inspiration underpinning her research and motivation towards the field, Gioia commented:
I developed my interest for Complex Systems at a Science Fair few years ago, seeing mathematical models of ants’ collective behaviour. It is incredible how the combination of single actions can give rise to a variety of collective phenomena. People usually think that as humans we are unique and diverse in our reactions, but often you can see collective patterns of common behaviour emerge.
Gioia Boschi
On winning the award, Gioia further elaborated:
It was a pleasure to present my work to the UK Parliament and I am very honoured to have been awarded with the bronze medal. This competition gave me the possibility to showcase my research to a very influential audience, but also gave me the opportunity to rethink my work and learn how to explain it in a non-technical way.
Gioia Boschi
Gioia is a member of the Disordered Systems group in King’s Department of Mathematics. The Disordered Systems group has a distinct interdisciplinary flavour, specialising in the development and analysis of models of complex systems in physics, biology, economics, and computer science, using the tools of statistical mechanics of disordered and complex systems. The group’s recent work has led to the development of new models to describe natural and social phenomena, such as systemic risk and catastrophic breakdown in complex systems, with applications to finance and the prediction of power outages.
Gioia’s poster can be viewed at the STEM for Britain website.
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Emeritus Professor of Statistical Physics