Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 7: Award Session: Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics (YSA)

SOE 7.2: Prize Talk

Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 14:45–15:30, GÖR/0226

How things spread: Complexity and criticality of inhomogeneous spreading models — •Laurent Hébert-Dufresne — University of Vermont, Burlington VT, USA — Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe NM, USA

Models of how things spread often assume that transmission mechanisms are fixed over space and time. However, the transmission of infectious diseases can depend on local human behaviour or quality of the surrounding infrastructure. Likewise, social contagions like the spread of ideas, beliefs, and innovations depend on local norms or culture, and they can lose or gain in momentum as they spread. Diseases mutate and find subpopulations where they can thrive, just as ideas can get reinforced, beliefs strengthened, and products refined. We study the impacts of these mechanisms in spreading and cascade dynamics. Using different modelling tools, we find that complexity and criticality are the norm: Superlinear relationships between exposure and transmission can emerge from linear interactions and power-law distributions with anomalous scaling can be observed away from any critical point.

Keywords: higher-order networks; branching processes; epidemic dynamics; spreading model