Professor Fujita served as Professor of the Institute of Economic Research at Kyoto University; President of the Institute of Developing Economies - JETRO (2003-2007); and Professor in the Department of Economics/Regional Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching interests are urban economics, regional economics, international trade, and spatial economics. He holds a Ph.D. in Regional Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Major works: The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade (with P. Krugman and A.J. Venables), MIT Press, 1999; Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth (with J. Thisse), Cambridge University Press, 2002; Spatial Economics, vol. 1, 2 (editor), The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2005; Regional Integration in East Asia: From the Viewpoint of Spatial Economics (editor), Macmillan, 2007
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Dr. Watanabe is a Professor for the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University. Prior to joining the faculty at Hitotsubashi University in 1999, he worked for the Bank of Japan (1982-1999). His areas of expertise include monetary policy, international finance, and corporate finance. Dr. Watanabe holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University (1992) and B.A. in Economics from the University of Tokyo (1982). A selection of his publications and papers includes: “A Statistical Analysis of Price Fluctuations in an Online Market,” Economic Review, Vol. 59, No. 4, 2008, (in Japanese); “Optimal Monetary Policy at the Zero Interest Rate Bound: The Case of Endogenous Capital Formation,” COE/RES Discussion Paper Series, 2005; “Characteristic Market Behaviors Caused by Intervention in Foreign Exchange Market,” Nikkei Econophysics III Proceedings; “Output-inflation tradeoff at near-zero inflation rates,” Journal of Japanese and International Economies, 14, 2000
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Dr. BARABÁSI is an expert in the field of Network Science, where his work has led to the discovery of scale-free networks and the proposed Barabasi-Albert model to explain the widespread emergence of networks in natural, technological, and social systems. He is a Professor of Physics at Notre Dame University and Director of the Northeastern University Center for Complex Network Research. Prior to joining the faculty at Notre Dame in 1995, he worked one year as a Research Physicist for IBM. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Boston University (1994) and M.S. in Theoretical Physics from Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary (1989). His recently published books include: The Structure and Dynamics of Networks, Princeton University Press, 2006; Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, New York: Plume, 2003; Linked: The New Science of Networks, Cambridge: Perseus, 2002, (available in Japanese); "Morphological and Compositional Evolution of Heteroepitaxial Semiconductor Thin Films," Materials Research Society, Vol. 618, 2000

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Dr. Sornette is Professor on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks in the Department of Management, Technology and Economics at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich). He is also a Professor of Physics and of Earth Sciences at ETH Zurich. Prior to joining the faculty at ETH in 2006, he was a Professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at UCLA (1995-2006), and Research Director in physical sciences (1990-2006) and Research Scientist (1981-1990) at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His areas of research include the prediction of crises and extreme events in complex systems with applications to finance, economics, marketing, earthquakes, and landslides; physics of complex systems and pattern formation in spatio-temporal structures, dynamical system theory, pattern recognition, and time series analysis; and finance and economics pertaining to the detection of pockets of predictability in financial markets, theory of bubbles and crashes and tests, large risks and tail dependence, theory of derivatives, portfolio optimization, trading strategies, insurance, macro-economics, agent-based models, market microstructure He is a member of the Swiss Finance Institute and the Director of Research for Insight Research LLC, a California-based firm developing alternative quantitative methods for investments, risk measures and asset allocations. Dr. Sornette holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nice (1985) and an M.S. in Physical Sciences from Ecole Normale Superieure (1981).
His recently published books include: Extreme Financial Risks, From Dependence to Risk Management, Heidelberg: Springer, 2005; Why Stock Markets Crash? Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems, Princeton University Press, 2003, (available in Japanese); Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences, Chaos, Fractals, Self-Organization and Disorder: Concepts and Tools, Heidelberg: Springer Series in Synergetics, 2nd edition, 2006

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Dr. Takayasu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where she specializes in Statistical Physics, Information Physics and Econophysics. Prior to joining the faculty of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2004, Dr. Takayasu was an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science at Future University-Hakodate (2000-2004), Assistant Professor in the Department of Science and Technology at Keio University (1997-2000), Visiting Researcher in the Physics Department at Boston University (1996-1997), and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Information Sciences at Tohoku University (1993-1996). She holds a Ph.D. in Science from Kobe University and a B.A. in Physics from Nagoya University.

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Dr. Stanley has been a faculty member at Boston University since 1976 and is currently Director of the Center for Polymer Studies in addition to Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, and Physiology. His previous experience includes professor in the Physics Department at M.I.T. (1969-1976), Research Fellow in the Physics Department at the University of California Berkeley (1968-1969) and staff member of the Solid State Physics Group at M.I.T. (1967-1968). His main current focus is on understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water in bulk, nano-confined, and biological environments. He has also worked on a range of other topics in complex systems, such as quantifying correlations among the constituents of the Alzheimer brain, and quantifying fluctuations in non-coding and coding DNA sequences, inter-beat intervals of the healthy and diseased heart. Dr. Stanley has a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University (1967) and a B.A. in Physics from Wesleyan University (1962). Selected publications include: An Introduction to Econophysics: Correlations and Complexity in Finance; Biological Systems Under Extreme Conditions: Structure and Function; From Newton to Mandelbrot: A Primer in Theoretical Physics With Fractals for the Personal Computer; Fractal Concepts in Surface Growth, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, and H. Eugene Stanley

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Prior to his current position, Mr. Oikawa served as Senior Executive Director, Development Bank of Japan (2003-2005); Advisor, Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (2002-2003); Research Counselor, TEPIA (2002-2003); Commissioner, Japan Patent Office; Director-General, Bureau of Equipment, Japan Defense Agency; Director-General for Policy Coordination, Minister’s Secretariat; Councilor, Cabinet Secretariat; Deputy Director-General for Security Export Control, International Trade Administration Bureau; Director, Coordination Division, Bureau of Equipment, Japan Defense Agency; Director, Small Enterprise Policy Division, Small and Medium Enterprise Agency; Counselor, Japanese Mission to European Community, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Director, Paper, Pulp & Printing Division, Consumer Goods Industries Bureau. Mr. Oikawa graduated from the University of Tokyo with a B.A. in Economics.
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