Santa Fe Institute

In a video interview, SFI President Jerry Sabloff says the language of mathematics has made it possible for researchers from half a dozen fields to ask new questions about social complexity.

The Institute has named two longtime SFI-affiliated researchers, Cris Moore and Luis Bettencourt, to its full-time resident faculty.

The tension between contingency and the regularities that underlie historical processes is a key to understanding many complex systems. SFI's 2012 Bulletin, now online, explores the interplay of time and chance.

Rather than improving at a (merely) exponential rate as some have theorized, information technology improves superexponentially -- which is to say, its progress accelerates -- according to SFI research.

Two SFI researchers are among an international team of scientists asking how fast mammal species have grown since the dinosaurs, how fast some species have shrunk, and why.

All living organisms collect information from their environments and use it to adapt. SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo likes to think of this as a form of “natural computation.”

At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor Scott Page explored how the proliferation of data about our movements and preferences will have profound impacts on politics, marketing, infrastructure design, and many other spheres.

At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI scientists described ways the latest research in complex systems might enhance the resilience and control of economic, social, and cyber systems.

At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor Stephanie Forrest offered insights about cybersecurity, drawing inspiration from biology.

At a session during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur offered insights about the impact of technologies that have the ability to disrupt economic systems.

In a recent paper, two SFI researchers and their collaborators suggest ways some animals’ developmental responses to a warmer climate may inhibit their abilities to thrive.

SFI External Professors Herbert Gintis and Jessica Flack weigh in on the challenges of understanding self-regarding versus cooperative behavior.

SFI External Professor Mercedes Pascual and colleagues have created a model that can forecast cholera outbreaks nearly a year before they happen in Bangladesh, giving public health officials more time to prepare.

Bizcommunity (South Africa) calls the burgeoning digital "second economy," described by SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur in an October 2011 McKinsey Quarterly essay, one of the most significant business trends of 2012.

Cities are open systems whose free-flow of people and ideas continually rejuvenates them, whereas corporations are closed systems that peak and die, according to an InformationWeek article that cites SFI's cities research.

By constructing models of the microbial communities inside the human digestive system, a team led by SFI External Professor Elhanan Borenstein has revealed key differences between the microbial network interactions in the guts of lean and obese people.

In a radio interview, SFI President Jerry Sabloff discusses SFI's signature style of scientific collaboration, and what scientists are learning about the evolution of intelligence, cities, and social complexity.

In Urbanite Baltimore, SFI Professors Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt discuss their nascent theory of cities, indicators of urban health and ideas for improving it, and Baltimore’s place in the metropolitan spectrum.

SFI President Jerry Sabloff tells readers of the Santa Fe New Mexican what the Institute does, and why 2012 is a year for asking big questions at SFI.

SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur argues that a deep, slow, and silent transformation of our economy is taking place today as a second digital economy supplants the physical one we know.

SFI has been awarded a major new grant from the John Templeton Foundation to pursue fundamental understandings of the hidden regularities in complex biological and social systems.

An analysis by SFI's Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis shows that of children born to the poorest 10 percent of parents in the United States, more than half remain in the bottom fifth of incomes as adults, reports Foreign Policy.

SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo describes his interest in "natural computation" -- in particular whether researchers can describe and analyze conflicts in animal societies as a series of computations.

It's true that cities are magnets for crime, pollution, and disease. But they also are centers of innovation, economic growth, and efficiency, argue SFI's Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West in Scientific American.

A study co-authored by SFI Faculty Chair Doug Erwin offers new details about the "great dying" 252 million years ago, during which three-quarters of the life on Earth perished.