News + Events

Few technologies invite quite as much discussion as AI. In December, SFI External Professor Scott Page led a small group of industry professionals to consider such a question — when does AI add value to a decision? — as part of SFI's first yearlong ACtioN Academy program.

The grid is in crisis, facing coinciding pressures including electrification, decarbonization, enormous demand from data centers, and grid technology updates like digitalization and artificial intelligence. A working group, "Converging Technologies, Diverging Institutions: Bridging Governance for the Grid and the Grid’s Edge," met at SFI February 19 – 25 to address these overarching challenges.

SFI External Professor Mark Newman (University of Michigan) has been awarded the 2026 John von Neumann Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for his contributions to the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of network science and their application to real-world systems. Newman is specifically recognized for advancing the understanding of structure in complex networks and for developing widely used algorithms to identify and measure that structure.

In SFI Miller Scholar Francis Spufford's new genre-spanning novel, Nonesuch, the fate of the world rests on one woman’s ability to interpret and manipulate complex systems as she navigates the interrelationships between politics, economics, WWII, and magic.

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) has been named the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG). The annual award celebrates “outstanding original contributions that use physical methods to develop a better understanding of socio-economic problems” by an early-career researcher under the age of 40.

Some computers are easy to spot. Artificial, human-built computers like those found in smartphones and laptops are abstract dynamic systems with observable computational elements like input, output, energy cost, and logical processes. Other computers aren’t so readily recognized. Scientists have argued that many natural dynamic systems — from cells to brains to turbulence in fluids — carry out computations, too. However, it’s not always been clear what these dynamic systems are computing, or how they might be harnessed to solve tasks. A recent paper in the Journal of Physics: Complexity describes a novel approach to identifying and studying the computations encoded in a dynamic system, offering a way forward.

Is the scientific method really the best approach to learning about the world? A new paper in Collective Intelligence applies the scientific method to itself, finding that some common strategies scientists consider gold standards for designing experiments perform worse than random choice. In other words: random exploration may produce better theories than carefully planned experiments.

SFI External Professor Santiago Elena has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, joining 62 other fellows in the class of 2026, each selected for their contributions in the field of microbiology.

A new study in PNAS introduces a mathematical model that quantifies how different systems, from cells to organizations, diversify and specialize as they grow. The study finds that while systems vary in how much they invest in creating entirely new functions, once those functions exist, their subsequent growth follows a remarkably universal pattern. As most systems measured in the study got bigger, the pace at which they added new functions steadily slowed — a pattern known as sublinear growth.

The Economy as an Evolving Complex System IV, published by the SFI Press in February 2026, is the latest in a series originally launched nearly four decades ago to rethink economics through the lens of complexity science. Rather than assuming markets always balance neatly, the book treats the economy as a living system that grows, changes, and reacts in ways that are hard to predict.

A century ago, the section of U.S. federal law governing public health and welfare was relatively small and loosely connected to the rest of the legal system. Today, it is one of the largest and most interconnected parts of the United States Code. That shift is one of many patterns revealed by a new dataset published in the journal Scientific Data, which reconstructs the U.S. Code — the official compilation of federal statutory law — from 1926 to 2023.

Whenever an authority has influence over a population — be it a social media platform moderating user comments, a government imposing laws on its citizens, or an employer placing restrictions on employees — some people will push back against the authority’s rules. In a study recently published in PNAS, SFI External Professor Stephanie Forrest and her colleagues devised a model for the give-and-take between dissenters, who break the rules, and authorities, who impose punishments.

Statistics such as a country’s gross domestic product or a city’s population size represent organizational and individual decisions over time. These figure are useful for policymaking, but they hide the complexity that stems from regional variations in choice. Program Postdoctoral Fellow Jordan Kemp hopes to leverage the richness of urban-growth data by capturing patterns of behaviors among different groups at various scales, from the individual to the population level.

We trust our memories because they feel natural, and we trust time because it seems to flow in only one direction. Physics, however, allows for stranger possibilities that challenge our intuition.

In a new paper, SFI researchers examine the Boltzmann brain hypothesis, a long-standing thought experiment that raises fundamental questions about memory, entropy, and the direction of time. The work clarifies how arguments for or against these ideas depend on assumptions about the past that are not fixed by physical laws alone.

A new study co-authored by SFI External Professor Laura Fortunato (University of Oxford), challenges a long-standing claim that polygynous marriage, where men have multiple wives, creates a surplus of men with no prospect of ever marrying. Counter to a widespread belief that a large contingent of unmarried men leads to negative social outcomes, including interpersonal violence and, in extreme cases, civil conflict, the research finds that polygyny often coexists with high rates of marriage among men.

A December 10–12 working group met to bring together researchers from two fields — neuromorphic computing and stochastic thermodynamics — to think about ways our built computers might replicate the energy efficiency of biological brains. 

Francis Spufford, an internationally award-winning writer of nonfiction and fiction, has joined SFI as Miller Scholar. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Francis Spufford teaches writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of several books, including Red Plenty, Golden Hill, and, most recently, Cahokia Jazz. 

In late December 2025, SFI External Professor Wendy Carlin was appointed the title Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, among the highest honors in the British system, for her wide-ranging research in economics.

A popular vision of life after climate action looks like vegetarians riding bikes, city centers without cars, and people foregoing air travel. But a paper published in Nature Sustainability finds that climate policies targeting lifestyle changes (say, urban car bans) actually weaken people’s green values, thereby undermining support for other needed environmental policies.

Biologists at UCLA used a natural experiment during the COVID-19 lockdowns to study the effects of human activity on urban wildlife. In a new study, SFI External Professor Pamela Yeh and co-author Eleanor Diamant describe one such impact: a rapid change in the beaks of black-eyed juncos.