Please join us in the next BPE Seminar on macroevolution, where Indrė Žliobaitė will approach the topic from both paleontological and computational perspectives.
Date & Time: Monday April 17, 1 PM
Location: Seismology Seminar Room (cookies & beverages will be served)
Zoom: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/94406810675
Passcode: evolution
Indrė will join us via zoom from Helsinki, but we encourage both online and in-person attendance to enjoy the snacks and socialize.
Comparing macroevolutionary processes across disciplines
The notion of evolution extends far beyond biological species. Languages change, music or fashion tastes continuously evolve, civilizations emerge, prosper and go extinct, economies rise and decline, financial or societal crises come and go. A big question of scientific and public curiosity is: to what extent evolutionary processes that underlie such dramatic transformations are alike across different domains? Do the same mechanisms operate across different time scales from financial crises spanning hours to mass extinctions spanning thousands of years? Do species, economies, languages, cultures age in the same way, and could their decline ever be predictable? In this talk I will discuss our ongoing research efforts to quantify patterns of rise and decline across six disciplines (palaeontology, microbiology, linguistics, musicology, economics and urban science) and compare them computationally.
Indrė Žliobaitė
Indrė Žliobaitė is an Associate professor at the University of Helsinki, where she leads an interdisciplinary research group on Data science and evolution. Her main ongoing research themes include: macroecology, palaeobiology, climate and vegetation modeling, as well as transparency, interpretability and fairness of machine-learned models. She is in charge of the major international database of fossil mammals (NOW).
