Peter M. A. Sloot

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor (Full) at University of Amsterdam

Complex networks, from neuronal assemblies to social systems, can exhibit abrupt, system-wide transitions without external forcing. These endogenously generated “noise-induced transitions” emerge from the intricate interplay between network structure and local dynamics, yet their underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Our study unveils two critical...

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a multifactorial disease that slowly and inconspicuously progresses over years. Here, we present a protocol for analyzing slow progression dynamics of T2D with obesity. We describe steps for using software to exploit the differences between the timescales of the metabolic variables and using numerical continuation and bifur...

Introduction Burns are characterized by a massive and prolonged acute inflammation, which persists for up to months after the initial trauma. Due to the complexity of the inflammatory process, Predicting the dynamics of wound healing process can be challenging for burn injuries. The aim of this study was to develop simulation models for the post-bu...

Network analysis is gaining momentum as an accepted practice to identify which factors in causal loop diagrams (CLDs)—mental models that graphically represent causal relationships between a system’s factors—are most likely to shift system-level behaviour, known as leverage points. This application of network analysis, employed to quantitatively ide...

Obesity is a major risk factor for the development of type 2 diabetes (T2D), where a sustained weight loss may result in T2D remission in individuals with obesity. To design effective and feasible intervention strategies to prevent or reverse T2D, it is imperative to study the progression of T2D and remission together. Unfortunately, this is not po...

In order to model criminal networks for law enforcement purposes, a limited supply of data needs to be translated into validated agent-based models. What is missing in current criminological modelling is a systematic and transparent framework for modelers and domain experts that establishes a modelling procedure for computational criminal modelling...

Compromised beta-cell identity is emerging as an important contributor of beta-cell dysfunction in type 2 diabetes (T2D). Several studies suggest that hyperglycemia induces the inactivation of transcription factors involved in mature beta-cell identity. More specifically, chronic hyperglycemia leads to the downregulation of PDX1 and MAFA, two impor...

Sepsis involves the dynamic interplay between a pathogen, the host response, the failure of organ systems, medical interventions and a myriad of other factors. This together results in a complex, dynamic and dysregulated state that has remained ungovernable thus far. While it is generally accepted that sepsis is very complex indeed, the concepts, a...

Background HIV treatment prescription is a complex process. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are a category of health information technologies that can assist clinicians to choose optimal treatments based on clinical trials and expert knowledge. The usability of some CDSSs for HIV treatment would be significantly improved by using the knowl...

Understanding how contact patterns arise from crowd movement is crucial for assessing the spread of infection at mass gathering events. Here we study contact patterns from Wi-Fi mobility data of large sports and entertainment events in the Johan Cruijff ArenA stadium in Amsterdam. We show that crowd movement behaviour at mass gathering events is no...

Abrupt, system-wide transitions can be endogenously generated by seemingly stable networks of interacting dynamical units, such as mode switching in neuronal networks or public opinion changes in social systems. However, it remains poorly understood how such `noise-induced transitions' are generated by the interplay of network structure and dynamic...

Complexity science and systems thinking are increasingly recognized as relevant paradigms for studying systems where biology, psychology, and socioenvironmental factors interact. The application of systems thinking, however, often stops at developing a conceptual model that visualizes the mapping of causal links within a system, e.g., a causal loop...

Healthcare is undergoing a profound technological and digital transformation and has become increasingly complex. It is important for burns professionals and researchers to adapt to these developments which may require new ways of thinking and subsequent new strategies. As Einstein has put it: ‘We must learn to see the world anew'. The relatively n...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an upsurge of protests. The emergence of civil resistance movements is often associated with various conditions of social systems. The analysis of social systems also shows the importance of considering the behaviour time scale and in particular slow-fast dynamics. The fine-grained datasets of the su...

Due to phenomena such as urban heat islands, outdoor thermal comfort of the cities’ residents emerges as a growing concern. A major challenge for mega-cities in changing climate is the design of urban spaces that ensure and promote pedestrian thermal comfort. Understanding pedestrian behavioural adaptation to urban thermal environments is criticall...

A burn wound is a complex systemic disease at multiple levels. Current knowledge of scar formation after burn injury has come from traditional biological and clinical studies. These are normally focused on just a small part of the entire process, which has limited our ability to sufficiently understand the underlying mechanisms and to predict syste...

Insurgency conflicts pose significant challenges to societies globally. The increase of insurgency conflicts creates a need to understand how insurgencies arise, and to identify societal drivers of insurgencies or effective strategies to counter them. In this paper, we analyze the contributions of computational modeling methods for the analysis of...

One of the most central questions in network science is: which nodes are most important? Often this question is answered using structural properties such as high connectedness or centrality in the network. However, static structural connectedness does not necessarily translate to dynamical importance. To demonstrate this, we simulate the kinetic Is...

Addiction is a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon, impacted by biological predispositions, psychological processes, and the social environment. Using mathematical and computational models that allow for surrogative reasoning may be a promising avenue for gaining a deeper understanding of this complex behavior. This paper reviews and classifies a se...

Chronic stress contributes to the onset of type 2 diabetes (T2D), yet the underlying etiological mechanisms are not fully understood. Responses to stress are influenced by earlier experiences, sex, emotions and cognition, and involve a complex network of neurotransmitters and hormones, that affect multiple biological systems. In addition, the syste...

Cross-sectional studies are widely prevalent since they are more feasible to conduct compared with longitudinal studies. However, cross-sectional data lack the temporal information required to study the evolution of the underlying dynamics. This temporal information is essential to develop predictive computational models, which is the first step to...

The Kumbh Mela festival is the largest mass gathering in the world that is celebrated every three years. In 2016, it attracted over 70 million people to Ujjain, India. The Mahakal temple is the “heart” of the festival that attracts a huge number of pilgrims and needs to accommodate with massive crowds. These types of events pose significant safety...

Urbanisation and common mental disorders (CMDs; ie, depressive, anxiety, and substance use disorders) are increasing worldwide. In this Review, we discuss how urbanicity and risk of CMDs relate to each other and call for a complexity science approach to advance understanding of this interrelationship. We did an ecological analysis using data on urb...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a resurgence of protests. Various societal conditions of social systems, such as economic stability, demographic ageing, and political elites, are often associated to the emergence of civil resistance movements. Several qualitative and quantitative models have been developed to analyse the relationsh...

Public health is threatened by climate change and extreme temperature events worldwide. Differences in health predispositions, access to cooling infrastructure and occupation raises an issue of heat-related health inequality in those vulnerable and disadvantaged demographic groups. To address these issues, a comprehensive understanding of the effec...

Pedestrian movements during large crowded events naturally consist of different modes of movement behaviour. Despite its importance for understanding crowd dynamics, intermittent movement behaviour is an aspect missing in the existing crowd behaviour literature. Here we analyse movement data generated from nearly 600 Wi-Fi sensors during large ente...

Production networks are integral to economic dynamics, yet dis-aggregated network data on inter-firm trade is rarely collected and often proprietary. Here we situate company-level production networks within a wider space of networks that are different in nature, but similar in local connectivity structure. Through this lens, we study a regional and...

Information exists when it is being copied—a rather important notion—think of bits, DNA and lottery. This concept is highlighted by Shannon’s classical paper on Information theory which describes a mathematical theory of communication, communication being equal to the copying of information. The second leading notion is that the copying process onl...

Production networks are integral to economic dynamics, yet dis-aggregated network data on inter-firm trade is rarely collected and often proprietary. Here we situate company-level production networks among networks from other domains according to their local connectivity structure. Through this lens, we study a regional and a national network of in...

Addiction is a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon, impacted by biological predispositions, psychological processes, and the social environment. Using mathematical and computational models that are capable of surrogative rea- soning may be a promising avenue for gaining a deeper understanding of this complex behavior. This paper reviews formal model...

Cross-sectional studies are widely prevalent since they are more feasible to conduct compared to longitudinal studies. However, cross-sectional data lack the temporal information required to study the evolution of the underlying processes. Nevertheless, this is essential to develop predictive computational models which is the first step towards cau...

There has been a number of reports showing evidence that human movement behaviour follows patterns resembling Lévy walks. These studies focus on the foraging patterns of rural humans and human hunter-gatherers. Here, we investigate motion patterns of visitors of a large dance event in the Johan Cruijff ArenA football stadium in Amsterdam. We find i...

The six-volume set LNCS 12742, 12743, 12744, 12745, 12746, and 12747 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2021, held in Krakow, Poland, in June 2021.* The total of 260 full papers and 57 short papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 635 submissions. 48 fu...

The six-volume set LNCS 12742, 12743, 12744, 12745, 12746, and 12747 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2021, held in Krakow, Poland, in June 2021.* The total of 260 full papers and 57 short papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 635 submissions. 48 fu...

The six-volume set LNCS 12742, 12743, 12744, 12745, 12746, and 12747 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2021, held in Krakow, Poland, in June 2021.* The total of 260 full papers and 57 short papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 635 submissions. 48 fu...

The six-volume set LNCS 12742, 12743, 12744, 12745, 12746, and 12747 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2021, held in Krakow, Poland, in June 2021.* The total of 260 full papers and 57 short papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 635 submissions. 48 fu...

The six-volume set LNCS 12742, 12743, 12744, 12745, 12746, and 12747 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2021, held in Krakow, Poland, in June 2021.* The total of 260 full papers and 57 short papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 635 submissions. 48 fu...

The six-volume set LNCS 12742, 12743, 12744, 12745, 12746, and 12747 constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2021, held in Krakow, Poland, in June 2021.* The total of 260 full papers and 57 short papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 635 submissions. 48 fu...

Background The mechanisms of action and efficacy of cisplatin and paclitaxel at cell population level are well studied and documented, however the localized spatio-temporal effects of the drugs are less well understood. We explore the emergence of spatially preferential drug efficacy resulting from variations in mechanisms of cell-drug interactions...

This research proposes a system based on a combination of various components for parallel modelling and forecasting the processes in networks with data assimilation from the real network. The main novelty of this work consists of the assimilation of data for forecasting the processes in social networks which allows improving the quality of the fore...

Coronary artery bypass grafting with cardiopulmonary bypass activates the human innate immune system (HIIS) and invokes a vigorous inflammatory response that is systemic. This massive inflammatory reaction can contribute to the development of postoperative complications that could topple the state of the system from health to disease, or even to so...

The analysis of questionnaires often involves representing the high-dimensional responses in a low-dimensional space (e.g., PCA, MCA, or t-SNE). However questionnaire data often contains categorical variables and common statistical model assumptions rarely hold. Here we present a non-parametric approach based on Fisher Information which obtains a l...

The mechanisms and impact of bacterial quorum sensing (QS) for the coordination of population level behaviors are well studied under laboratory conditions. However, it is unclear how, in otherwise open environmental systems, QS signals accumulate to sufficient concentration to induce QS phenotypes, especially when quorum quenching (QQ) organisms ar...

Group‐level obesity can be seen as an emergent property of a complex system, consisting of feedback loops between individual body weight perception, individual weight‐related behaviour and group‐level social norms (a product of group‐level ‘normal' body mass index (BMI) and sociocultural ‘ideal' BMI). As overweight becomes normal, the norm might be...

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Elevated walking speed is an indicator of increased pace of life in cities, caused by environmental pressures inherent to urban environments, which lead to short- and long-term consequences for health and well-being. In this paper we investigate the effect of walking speed on heat stress. We define the heat-stress-optimal walking speed and estimate...

The seven-volume set LNCS 12137, 12138, 12139, 12140, 12141, 12142, and 12143 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2020, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2020.* The total of 101 papers and 248 workshop papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 71...

The seven-volume set LNCS 12137, 12138, 12139, 12140, 12141, 12142, and 12143 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2020, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2020.* The total of 101 papers and 248 workshop papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 71...

The seven-volume set LNCS 12137, 12138, 12139, 12140, 12141, 12142, and 12143 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2020, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2020.* The total of 101 papers and 248 workshop papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 71...

The seven-volume set LNCS 12137, 12138, 12139, 12140, 12141, 12142, and 12143 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2020, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2020.* The total of 101 papers and 248 workshop papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 71...

The seven-volume set LNCS 12137, 12138, 12139, 12140, 12141, 12142, and 12143 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2020, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2020.* The total of 101 papers and 248 workshop papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 71...

The seven-volume set LNCS 12137, 12138, 12139, 12140, 12141, 12142, and 12143 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2020, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2020.* The total of 101 papers and 248 workshop papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 71...

The seven-volume set LNCS 12137, 12138, 12139, 12140, 12141, 12142, and 12143 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2020, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2020.* The total of 101 papers and 248 workshop papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 71...

Background: The efficacy of smartphone apps for improving medication adherence in type 2 diabetes is not well studied in Asian populations. Objective: This study aimed to determine the feasibility, acceptability, and clinical outcomes of using a smartphone app to improve medication adherence in a multiethnic Asian population with type 2 diabetes...

Morphological changes in bacterial biofilm structures arise from the fluid-structure interactions between the biofilm and the surrounding fluid. Depending on the magnitude of the force acting on the structure, the bacteria rearrange to attain an equilibrium shape or get washed away by the moving fluid. Understanding the dynamics behind the evolutio...

Complexity of patient care is rapidly increasing as a consequence of rising numbers of patients with complex multimorbidity. Not just the patient as a whole, but also the networks of organs, tissues and cells are forming a complex adaptive system (CAS). A CAS is defined as a network of several components ('agents') with lots of mutual feedback loop...

Background: Smartphone apps are becoming increasingly popular for supporting diabetes self-management. A key aspect of diabetes self-management is appropriate medication-taking. This study aims to systematically assess and characterise the medication management features in diabetes self-management apps and their congruence with best-practice evide...

The International Conference on Computational Science is an annual conference that brings together researchers and scientists from mathematics and computer science as basic computing disciplines, as well as researchers from various application areas who are pioneering computational methods in sciences such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, engi...

The five-volume set LNCS 11536, 11537, 11538, 11539 and 11540 constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2019, held in Faro, Portugal, in June 2019. The total of 65 full papers and 168 workshop papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 573 submissions (228 submis...

Background Major alteration in lifestyle of human population has promoted Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) to the level of an epidemic. This metabolic disorder is characterized by insulin resistance and pancreatic β-cell dysfunction and apoptosis, triggered by endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, oxidative stress and cytokines. Computational modeling...

The five-volume set LNCS 11536, 11537, 11538, 11539 and 11540 constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2019, held in Faro, Portugal, in June 2019. The total of 65 full papers and 168 workshop papers presented in this book set were carefully reviewed and selected from 573 submissions (228 submis...

Alkaline phosphatase (AP) is an enzyme that exhibits anti-inflammatory effects by dephosphorylating inflammation triggering moieties (ITMs) like bacterial lipopolysaccharides and extracellular nucleotides. AP administration aims to prevent and treat peri- and post-surgical ischemia reperfusion injury in cardiothoracic surgery patients. Recent studi...

Background: HIV treatment prescription is a complex process; clinical decision support systems (CDSS) can assist clinicians to choose optimal treatments. These support systems are based on clinical trials and expert knowledge; however, the amount of data available to these systems is limited. For this reason, CDSSs could be significantly improved b...

It is still unclear under which conditions temporary combined antiretroviral therapy (cART) results in a prolonged remission after interruption. Clinical trials have contradicting reposts about the effect of cART during primary HIV infection on the disease progression. Here we propose that the apparent contradiction is due the presence of a window...

Thermal comfort of people in outdoor urban spaces is a growing concern in cities due to climate change and urbanization. In outdoor settings the climate and behavior of people are more dynamic than in indoor situations, therefore a steady state of the thermoregulatory system is rarely reached. Understanding the dynamics of outdoor thermal comfort r...

Malaria remains a deadly disease that affected millions of people in 2016. Among the five Plasmodium (P.) parasites which contribute to malaria diseases in humans. P. falciparum is a lethal one which is responsible for the majority of the world-wide-malaria-related deaths. Since the banana-shaped stage V gametocytes play a crucial role in disease t...

Modelling and simulation of bacterial biofilms is a computationally expensive process necessitating use of parallel computing. Fluid dynamics and advection-consumption models can be decoupled and solved to handle the fluid-solute-bacterial interactions. Data exchange between the two processes add up to the communication overheads. The heterogenous...

We perform the analysis of scientific collaboration at the level of universities. The scope of this study is to answer two fundamental questions: (i) can one indicate a category (i.e., a scientific discipline) that has the greatest impact on the rank of the university and (ii) do the best universities collaborate with the best ones only? Using two...

Segregation of bacteria based on their metabolic activity in biofilms plays an important role in the development of antibiotic drug resistance. Mushroom-shaped biofilm structures, which are reported for many bacteria, exhibit topographically varying levels of multiple drug resistance from the cap of the mushroom to its stalk. Understanding the dyna...

In dynamical systems, local interactions between dynamical units generate correlations which are stored and transmitted throughout the system, generating the macroscopic behavior. However a framework to quantify and study this at the microscopic scale is missing. Here we propose an 'information processing' framework based on Shannon mutual informat...

In 2010, an estimated 860 million people were living in slums worldwide, with around 60 million added to the slum population between 2000 and 2010. In 2011, 200 million people in urban Indian households were considered to live in slums. In order to address and create slum development programmes and poverty alleviation methods, it is necessary to un...

The three-volume set LNCS 10860, 10861 + 10862 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2018, held in Wuxi, China, in June 2018. The total of 155 full and 66 short papers presented in this book set was carefully reviewed and selected from 404 submissions. The papers were organized in topical se...

The three-volume set LNCS 10860, 10861 and 10862 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2018, held in Wuxi, China, in June 2018. The total of 155 full and 66 short papers presented in this book set was carefully reviewed and selected from 404 submissions. The papers were organized in topical...

The three-volume set LNCS 10860, 10861 and 10862 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2018, held in Wuxi, China, in June 2018. The total of 155 full and 66 short papers presented in this book set was carefully reviewed and selected from 404 submissions. The papers were organized in topical...

Current studies of outdoor thermal comfort are limited to calculating thermal indices or interviewing people. The first method does not take into account the way people use this space, whereas the second one is limited to one particular study area. Simulating people’s thermal perception along with their activities in public urban spaces will help a...

We describe two approaches to detecting anomalies in time series of multi-parameter clinical data: (1) metric and model-based indicators and (2) information surprise. (1) Metric and model-based indicators are commonly used as early warning signals to detect transitions between alternate states based on individual time series. Here we explore the ap...

The existence of slums or informal settlements is common to most cities of developing countries. In India, slums contain a wealth of diversity that is masked by a high level of poverty and rather insufficient access to resources. Recent studies have identified that the conventional perception of slums as distinctive homogeneous settlements is incor...