The two parts of this volume feature seventeen and six extended conference abstracts
corresponding to selected talks given by participants at Joint CRM-Imperial College Workshop in
Complex Systems and Emergence Spread and Control of Infectious Diseases respectively both
held at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica in Barcelona in spring 2013. Most of them are short
articles giving preliminary presentations of new results not yet published in regular research
journals. The articles are the result from a direct collaboration among active researchers in
the area after working in a dynamic and productive atmosphere. Almost everything that is
interesting and important for society is complex here examples scattered across science are
presented in order to illustrate the cross-disciplinary richness of state-of-the-art complex
systems research: fracture avalanches and rain showers that mimic earthquakes highly organized
graphs that account for processes in neural networks metabolic networks food webs or
language models for DNA dynamics or statistical methods to test complexity in the form of
structure along many different scales. The mathematics is put to work for the modeling of the
real system and the models are kept at a minimum level to allow the understanding of the
essentials of the real system. The book is intended for established researchers as well as for
PhD and postdoc students who wish to learn more about the latest advances in these active areas
of research.
