The 2016 edition of the Conference on Complex Systems (CCS) (link: http://www.ccs2016.org) was held on September 19-22 in Amsterdam.

As usual the themes of the conference covered several technical aspects of complexity, as well applications to problems in economics, finance and business, biology, and social science.

The set of keynote speakers was quite diverse. For example Stuart Kauffman delivered a provocative lecture on the origin of consciousness, Doyne Farmer gave a lucid review of Complexity Economics, Ed Bullmore talked about networks in neuroscience, Sonia
Kéfi presented her work in multiplex ecological networks, and Misako Takayasu talked about business transaction networks.

This year the conference was characterised by the large number, and sheer variety, of satellite sessions (link: http://www.ccs2016.org/satellite-sessions1.html), and it was often difficult to decide which session to attend.  While there were many sessions on economics and finance, the topics that are now a regular fixture of CCS, such as networks (Dynamics on/of Complex Networks was on its ninth edition), epidemics, and cities, were also present.

Specific talks that I found interesting included James Gleeson's  presentation of models of Twitter avalanches, Diego Garlaschelli's lecture on community detection for correlation matrices, and Markus Strohmaier's illustration of how different segments of a population have their own Markovian dynamics, which included an amusing slide showing Finnish last.fm users drifting towards metal (I know, shocking!) (link: https://twitter.com/marianobegue/status/778175511344340992).

Next year's edition of CCS will be in Cancún, Mexico.