Santa Fe Institute

Researchers have demonstrated quantum illumination in the lab, a technique first proposed in 2008 by SFI Science Board member and External Professor Seth Lloyd, according to a paper published in Nature.

A feature in the May issue of Smithsonian reviews the birth at SFI of the growing field of "quantitative urbanism" and its progress toward an improved theoretical, mathematical understanding of cities.

Jameson Toole, a 2009 participant in SFI's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, sees cell phones as little sensors with big potential, according to a feature in MIT News.

SFI External Professor Aaron Clauset is among a small group of scientists beginning to use statistical tools from seismology and physics to forecast future patterns of war and terrorism.

SFI Research Fellow Simon DeDeo comments on a recent paper in Physical Review Letters that proffers a mathematical explanation for intelligent behavior based on entropy.

Three SFI-affiliated scientists -- Jessica Green, Scott Page, and Patricia McAnany -- are among 175 U.S. and Canadian scholars, artists, and scientists named today as 2013 Guggenheim Fellows.

SFI researchers are building improved models capable of capturing the financial behavior of millions of households, companies, and governments playing roles in an economy.

In a recent SFI seminar, Aaron Clauset introduces a model that can quantify a competition's scoring tempo and balance and uses the model to draw interesting new conclusions about the relationship between a game's structure and dynamics.

In trying to optimize a data-rich process using many sources of information, scientists traditionally have used their intuitions to choose from information sources on the fly. SFI External Professor David Wolpert wants to let machines do it instead.

SFI researchers are drawing on information theory and a couple of remarkable datasets – hundreds of years of courtroom transcripts and thousands of military action reports – to discover hidden patterns in information.

A recent SFI working group explored new ways to examine data from hundreds of instances of particular types of food webs to study how species resist or adjust to changing ecological contexts.

Climate change could alter the balance of temperature and moisture needed for grape growing and shift the global geography of wine production, according to a study published in PNAS and co-authored by SFI External Professor Pablo Marquet.

A recent SFI workshop on "Network Structure and Inequality" examined social network structure as a way to make predictions about how the distribution of wealth changes over time in human societies.

Finding a theory that unifies all interactions among particles, including gravitation, is the Holy Grail of physics, said SFI Distinguished Fellow and co-founder Murray Gell-Mann during a recent visit to Singapore.

SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt remarks on a new paper evaluating the difficulty of protecting an individual's privacy in a age of cell phone ubiquity and the wealth of data it produces.

SFI's James O'Dwyer remarks on a recent paper that provides new evidence that diversification might not be driven by selection.

Wikipedia's remarkable accuracy and usefulness comes from something larger than the sum of its written contributions, a new study by SFI Research Fellow Simon DeDeo finds.

Artifacts tell a story about the growth, collapse, and change of social networks in the late pre-Hispanic Southwest, according to an article published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Forbes contributor Steve Denning reviews past financial bubbles, as early as the tulip bubble of 1636, and agrees with SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur that economies react to technological revolutions in predictable phases.

A new study co-authored by SFI External Professor Marcus Feldman demonstrates that not only is long-term evolution possible, but long-term evolutionary outcomes can be surprisingly predictable.

A recent book co-authored by SFI External Professor David Wolpert explores how decisions made in both natural and artificial systems often differ from those recommended by Bayesian decision theory.

A recent book co-authored by SFI Science Board member Daniel Stein offers an accessible introduction to spin glasses, why they are important, and how they are opening up new ways of thinking about complexity.

SFI External Professor Doyne Farmer reviews the basics of complex systems and describes some of the commonalities between financial market behavior and principles at work in physics and nature.

Science writer George Johnson, in his science blog "Fire In the Mind," reviews the origins of SFI in a post about humankind's relentless search for order in the universe.

In a 2012 World Economic Forum video, SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West describes the hidden mathematical rules that govern urbanization. Watch the video.