This project is structured around three conceptual milestones:

(1) Development of a Science of Complex Systems,

(2) strong transversal component affecting all the scientific objectives proposed, and

(3) interdisciplinarity of the investigated problems.

THE SCIENCE OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS – In the last decades, there has been a steadily increasing interest to transfer methods and concepts belonging to statistical mechanics proper to other scientific areas. In a complementary fashion, the analysis from a global viewpoint of the emerging organization in problems belonging to disciplines external (in principle) to physics, as biology or sociology, has uncovered the parallelisms between collective behaviour in the latter and the formal approaches using in condensed matter physics or complex materials. We are on the way to unifying both the phenomenology observed in those apparently disparate systems and the techniques shared by the study of all of them. In this sense, the groups taking part in this project are well aware of (i) the need to adapt analytical techniques and concepts arising from statistical mechanics to other disciplines and (ii) the advance that can be possibly obtained by understanding the organizational dynamics of systems formed by many interacting agents, in particular those characteristic of biology and sociology, in the language and framework of statistical mechanics at and out-of-equilibrium. These milestones transcend the individual research programme of the groups, but rely on the precise advances they contribute.