IAS Amsterdam: Emergence — searching for laws of human behavior

I’m excited to be heading to Amsterdam on May 20th to give an invited lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Amsterdam, organized by the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) as part of the IAS Festival 2026.

The talk is titled “Emergence: searching for laws of human behavior”, and the abstract

Across the last decade and change, my group has spent a lot of time staring at large datasets of how people move through cities. Out of that staring came a handful of observations that look suspiciously law-like — people seem to operate within quantifiable bounds, they structure their spatial lives hierarchically, and once you account for environment, surprisingly clean patterns appear. The talk walks through some of that, and then steps back to ask a meta-question about methodology: most of what we’ve found didn’t come from testing pre-registered hypotheses. It came from open-ended exploration of rich datasets, following surprising patterns wherever they led. Whether that’s a feature or a bug is a fun thing to argue about.

This is the morning after the Science and Cocktails Amsterdam evening — I wrote about that one a couple of days ago — so the Festival is, for me, a 36-hour Amsterdam double-header. If you’re around for either, come say hi.

Surgical Theatre, University Library, 10:00–12:00. Full details on the event page.