Submitted by Dr Petra Vertes on Fri, 07/03/2014 - 13:37
We are very pleased to advertise the public talk held by Duncan Watts (of Watts-Strogatz fame) on Tuesday 11th March at 17:30 in the NCR at Corpus Christi College
Pre-registration is now open by clicking on link as follows:
Title: "The Myth of Common Sense: Why Everything That Seems Obvious Isn't"
Abstract:
Common sense is always a good thing, isn't it? Maybe not. Although common sense is extremely useful for dealing with everyday problem solving, when applied to the kind of large-scale problems that arise in government, business, policy, and marketing, it can suffer from systematic failures. Nevertheless, because of the way we learn from history, these failures are rarely apparent to us. Fortunately, learning to suspect one's own common sense can lead to other, more reliable approaches.
Duncan Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. From 2000-2007, he was a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and then, prior to joining Microsoft, a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group. In July 2013, he will commence a six-year appointment as an “A.D. White Professor at Large” at Cornell University, Cornell’s highest honor for external scholars.