What Is CoCo?

CoCo is an interdisciplinary Organized Research Center (ORC) at Binghamton University that studies the collective dynamics of various types of interacting agents as complex systems. Its goals are to:

1. Advance our understanding about the dynamics of physical, biological, social, and engineered complex systems through scientific research,
2. Promote interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty and students in different colleges/schools and departments, and
3. Translate the understanding to products and processes which will improve the well-being of people at regional, state, national and global scales.

With the active participation of faculty members with diverse backgrounds, CoCo has been playing a key role in producing several interdisciplinary research projects since 2007 as an informal research group. It officially became a designated ORC of the University (the Center for Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems) on July 1st, 2015. The Center's name was officially updated to the "Binghamton Center of Complex Systems" on July 1st, 2023, to better reflect the continuously expanding scope of CoCo.

CoCo is also the hosting organization of the US Northeast Chapter of the Complex Systems Society.

There is an email list run by CoCo for general discussions on complex systems. To subscribe, please contact Hiroki Sayama.

CoCo CRISPIE, a student group of CoCo, has launched in Spring 2023!! Check out their website.

Take a look at our CoCo brochure here.

You can support CoCo's research and educational activities by making donations! See more details.

Get your CoCo merch at our RedBubble online shop! (No profit would come to CoCo; they are just for fun)

What Are Complex Systems?

Complex systems are networks of many components with nonlinear interactions which arise and evolve through self-organization, such that the system is neither completely regular nor completely random, permitting the development of emergent behavior. These properties can be found in many real-world systems, such as gene regulatory networks in a cell, physiological systems, brains and other neural systems, food webs, stock markets, the Internet, and social networking systems. We study their structural/dynamical properties to obtain general, cross-disciplinary implications and applications.