The 2026 edition of the Complexity 72h Workshop has wrapped up in London, bringing together roughly 60 participants and 14 tutor teams for three days of intensive, collaborative science. Hosted by Northeastern University London and the Network Science Institute (NetSI), the event carried on a tradition launched in 2018 where researchers form small teams around a specific project and work flat-out for 72 hours, with the goal of having a paper ready for an online repository by the time the clock runs out. The track record so far is perfect — 33 out of 33 past projects have become preprints.
This year's cohort tackled a notably wide range of questions. Projects spanned political polarization and belief networks, brain connectivity and the social self, regional greenhouse-gas trends, emergent deception in LLM-based agent models, statistical signatures of success in NBA basketball, patterns in egocentric communication networks, and the long-term impact of AI on education. The diversity of topics is part of what makes the format so generative: participants arrive from different disciplines and leave having genuinely done science together.
The speaker lineup was equally broad. Guido Caldarelli, Director of the Institute of Complex Systems in Rome, lectured on financial networks; Jessica Davis of Northeastern's MOBS Lab brought expertise in epidemic modelling and network science; Federico Levi, Deputy Editor for Physics and Computing at Nature, led a session on writing and publishing influential research; and Miriam Redi, Research Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, spoke on research science for free knowledge.
The London edition also marked a milestone beyond the workshop itself: the formal launch of Complexity Next Gen, a new non-profit organization founded in Torino (Italy) in 2026. Dedicated to training the next generation of researchers in complex systems, the association focuses on early-career scientists and promotes innovative, hands-on, and interdisciplinary forms of scientific training — exposing participants to the full scientific process, from collaboration and problem framing through to publication. Complexity72h is its flagship event, and with participation numbers growing edition by edition, the appetite for this kind of immersive research sprint is clearly expanding.
What the format proves, year after year, is that ambitious scientific questions don't always need years of isolated effort to move forward. Sometimes 72 hours, the right room of people, and a hard deadline are enough.
