About Us
Systems enable humans to achieve common goals, operate complicated tasks, function interactively with multitudes of other agents and actors, communicate among and with their diverse individual elements, survive in a hostile environment, maintain a continuity of purpose and goals, and guarantee the survival of physical and biological entities. Systems of interest are natural systems, engineered systems, and socio-political economic systems. Many of these systems are highly complex, defying comprehensive understanding and easy manipulation. Human beings design and operate some of these systems, and often are governed by the systems, which nature and humans have created.
The Park Center for Complex Systems at MIT was established in 2002 to conduct educational and research programs in the field of complexity and complex systems. The Park Center was created as the research of its predecessor organization, the Manufacturing Institute at MIT, had been increasingly diversified to deal with complexity issues in many fields of engineering and science, including the field of manufacturing.
The Park Center is named to honor an MIT alumnus, Dr. BJ Park and his wife Mrs. Chunghi Park, who have provided a generous gift to fund operating costs, including graduate and post-doctoral fellowships.
The mission of the Park Center for Complex Systems is to research and understand complexity, to educate students and scholars on complexity, to design complex systems for the benefit of humankind, and to disseminate knowledge on complexity to the world at large. In particular,
1.
To conduct basic research in complexity
2.
To demonstrate the power of basic scientific framework for
complexity by designing robust, stable and reliable engineered systems
3.
To reduce complexity of existing systems through the
application of complexity theory
4. To understand the complexity of natural systems through the application of the complexity theory to the workings of biological and environmental systems
5. To apply the complexity theory in improving socio-economic political systems for their efficient design and operation
This mission will be accomplished by persistently pursuing fundamental research in the field of complexity and applying the knowledge to complex systems design for a variety of industry applications.
For your reference, “Introduction of
the MIT Park Center for Complex Systems” is available in pdf format.
