📣 Apply now for a CaCTüS Summer Internship 2027 in Germany!
🌵The Computation and Cognition Tübingen Summer Internship is a fully funded 3-months internship at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, our MPI-IS and the Tübingen AI Center located in Tübingen, Germany.
🧠 Interns work on research projects spanning machine learning, theoretical neuroscience, computational psychiatry, behavioral experiments and data analysis.
🎓 Who can apply? Bachelor’s and master’s students in the fields of computer science, robotics, maths, physics, engineering, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, bioinformatics and any other related fields.
🌍 CaCTüS aims to boost the careers of talented students who experience significant difficulties in their pursuit of higher education. Applications from low- and middle-income countries are specifically encouraged.
🔗 Learn more and apply: https://www.projects.tuebingen.mpg.de/
#PhD Position Open in Complex Networks at Leiden University, the Netherlands!
https://careers.universiteitleiden.nl/job/Leiden-PhD-Candidate-in-Complex-Networks/16991-en_US/
Social Physics: A manifesto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08117
Social Physics seeks quantitative, empirically testable explanations of collective human behavior. Its name has a long and contested history, but its contemporary program is neither the claim that society is literally a physical system nor an attempt to replace the social sciences with physics. It is an interdisciplinary practice: observation and experimentation, model construction, mathematical and computational analysis, and repeated confrontation with data. The field has been transformed by analyzing digital traces, network science, agent-based modeling, large-scale experiments, and the capacity to study coupled dynamics across economic, social, technological, biological, and physical layers. We review advances in financial analysis and modeling; economic complexity; the structure and evolution of social networks; spreading, opinion, and information dynamics; inequality, cooperation, conflict, mobility, cities, culture, science, and collective behavior; and the emerging study of human-AI ecosystems. Across these domains, common features recur - heterogeneity, interaction, feedback, adaptation, non-equilibrium dynamics, multiscale organization, and emergent collective outcomes. We also confront the limitations that have arisen in this field: convenience samples, platform dependence, weak causal identification, over-universal claims, insufficient engagement with meaning and institutions, privacy risks, and the danger that predictive models become instruments of manipulation. We propose a future Social Physics organized around theory - data reciprocity; causal and generative explanation; measurement validity and cross-context generalization; responsible, participatory data governance; genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration; and reflexive study of interventions and algorithms that alter the systems being observed.