News + Events

An SFI working group meets November 4-5 to explore phase transitions in viruses.

A group of biologists think that a new synthesis in evolutionary theory might help answer the question of how life’s progenitor originally emerged. A working group, meeting November 13-15, brings together evolutionary theorists and experimentalists to explore which evolutionary models might best explain how chemical systems become biological systems.

The Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees welcomes Vijay Ullal of Seabed VC.

SFI is accepting applications from accomplished journalists for the Complex Systems Summer School Journalism Fellowship. The submission deadline is February 28, 2020.

In his quarterly column, SFI President David Krakauer asks how economics, a social science, could experience the revolutions and refutations that characterize progress in the natural sciences.

The Santa Fe Institute is accepting applications for the 2019 Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science (GWCSS). Apply by February 11, 2020.

In The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design, SFI External Professor Michael Kearns and his University of Pennsylvania colleague Aaron Roth offer a set of principled solutions based on the emerging science of socially aware algorithm design.

Melanie Mitchell presented an SFI Community Lecture on artificial intelligence at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on November 12.

On October 18, a group of ten computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars from the Santa Fe Institute and The University of New Mexico submitted a formal response to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) proposal to dramatically revise the Fair Housing Act.

The Santa Fe Institute is accepting applications for its signature education program for graduate students, early-career scientists, and professionals: the 2020 Complex Systems Summer School, June 14-July 10, 2020. Apply by January 21, 2020.

The Santa Fe Institute is accepting applications for its Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) summer program. Apply by January 7, 2019.

External Professor Allison Stanger’s book Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump is garnering significant media attention.

Through the new Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship, which launched September 1, SFI is bridging the gap between academia and industry.

During Earth’s last glacial period, temperatures on the planet periodically spiked dramatically and rapidly. A new paper in the journal Chaos by SFI's Joshua Garland, Liz Bradley, and coauthors suggests that mathematics from information theory could offer a powerful tool for analyzing and understanding them.

Ashley Teufel and Luis Zaman's working group, “The Point of No Return,” seeks to identify the underlying properties driving entrenchment, a phenomenon in which a single event can have a widespread effect on an entire system, and find ways to infer, predict or even control it.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a solid history of how we got from pocket calculators to facial recognition and self-driving cars, a lucid tour of how these systems operate, and a measured warning against placing more trust in these systems than they deserve.

The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution is one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory. But a new paper by Sam Bowles and  Jung-Kyoo Choi shows that most explanations for it don’t agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation.

Jessica Flack presents an SFI Community Lecture on collective computation at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on October 22.

External Professor Raissa D’Souza has won the Network Science Society’s inaugural Euler award for her influential work in "the discovery and study of explosive percolation in networks and the insights it provided to explosive synchronization and network optimization.”

SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur has been selected as a 2019 Citation Laureate by the Web of Science group “for research revealing network effects in economic systems that produce increasing returns."