For three weeks, she immersed herself in the study of complex systems, learning directly from leading scientists in the field and exploring a remarkably broad range of topics – from biology and evolution to culture, language, LLMs, and much more.
Across these different fields, she discovered how a shared set of approaches can be used to ask questions about complex phenomena, including agent-based modeling, dynamical systems, and network science – methods that form a common language across complex systems research.
Surrounded by students, researchers and journalists from around the world who share a passion for science, Íris stepped outside her comfort zone and beyond her usual research agenda to work on two new projects. The first focused on understanding gentrification as a dynamical system: how these processes unfold, what factors influence them, and where interventions and policies might be targeted to prevent entire neighborhoods or cities from becoming gentrified.
The second explored diversity in movies over time, asking a timely question: Are movies becoming more similar since the arrival of Netflix? Together with her colleagues, Íris investigated whether temporal character networks extracted from movie scripts can capture meaningful information about films, and whether these networks reveal increasing similarities in the structures of movies over time.
The summer school was a “life-changing experience,” says Íris. It was an opportunity not only to learn new tools and approaches, explore less familiar questions, start new collaborations, and make great friends, but, most importantly, to realize that there are no impossible questions in science – and that curiosity, imagination, and the willingness to cross the traditional boundaries between fields have an essential place in the creation of knowledge.