News + Events

Aug. 5-7, SFI hosts its second working group on cumulative cultural evolution, led by Vanessa Ferdinand, Rob Boyd, and Bill Thompson.

A new paper in Animal Behaviour lays out three concepts from complex systems science that could advance studies into animal social complexity.

Today’s quantum computers sustain temperatures approaching absolute zero and are designed to solve problems that would require millions of years for even the world’s best supercomputers. However, the rate of hardware development is seemingly outpacing the growth of algorithms that can leverage the phenomena of quantum mechanics. A July 30 through Aug. 2 working group aims to address this shortage of algorithms.

An incoming editorial team for a flagship political science journal aims to confront race and gender. They met at the Santa Fe Institute July 17-19, 2019 for a brainstorming retreat.

Laboratory populations that quietly amass 'cryptic' genetic variants are capable of surprising evolutionary leaps, according to a paper in the July 26 issue of Science. A better understanding of cryptic variation may improve directed evolution techniques for developing new biomolecules for medical and other applications.

Most game theory models don’t reflect the relentlessly random timing of the real world. In a new paper, Justin Grana, James Bono, and SFI Professor David Wolpert model what happens when players receive information or act at random times, which could make a big difference in decision-making.

The July issue of Knowable Magazine published an interview with Jeremy Sabloff, External Professor Emeritus of SFI and past President of the Institute (2009-2015), about his work on “the archaeology of common folk,” which is reviewed in the 2019 Annual Review of Anthropology.

“Subtitle heroes,” as they’re known in the SFI education office, are a community of people worldwide who have dedicated their time to making SFI’s online courses available in 63 languages to date.

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, creator of SFI’s online education platform, was named co-chair of SFI’s Science Board at its 2019 spring meeting.

SFI Science Board member Derek Smith has worked in academia, industry, and public health. He is using insights from his work at SFI to develop an evolution-inspired flu vaccine.

SFI External Professor Raissa D’Souza (UC Davis) has joined the journal Physical Review Research as Lead Editor.

The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines, edited by David Wolpert, Chris Kempes, Peter Stadler, and Joshua Grochow, lays out recent advances that are driving a new “thermodynamics of computation.”

External Professor Stephanie Forrest and co-authors received the 2019 Ten-Year Most Influential Paper award from the International Conference on Software Engineering for their 2009 paper "Automatically Finding Patches Using Genetic Programming."

Former SFI Postdoc Jeremy Van Cleve, now an assistant professor of biology at the University of Kentucky, has received a CAREER award for early career faculty from the National Science Foundation.

Tuesday, July 9, computer scientist Sabine Hauert discussed how individual actions give rise to swarm behaviors, and the challenges researchers face when engineering swarms for desired applications.

Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier, events occurring with higher-than-expected probability. Using the same mathematical tools that describe stock market crashes, SFI researchers explain the evolutionary dynamics behind this universal pattern in the fossil record and uncover "a new normal."

In their essay for Aeon, External Professor Sara Walker and Professor Michael Lachmann argue that we would do well to understand life as a process of transmitting information.

In his new book Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity, SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner compares the tools of biological evolution with those of human innovation to make sense of the creative process that is happening in our minds all the time.

This summer marks the 25th anniversary of SFI’s Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science and Complexity. To learn what makes this annual event so special — and how it has evolved over a quarter century and more than 275 participants — we sat down with co-directors and founders John Miller and Scott Page.

To start addressing pressing questions raised by the proliferation of new crypto networks, SFI hosts a workshop on “Collective Crypto” June 13.