News + Events

In a paper published in Science Advances, researchers from the Santa Fe Institute describe a new algorithm called SpringRank that uses wins and losses to quickly find rankings lurking in large networks. When tested on a wide range of synthetic and real-world datasets, ranging from teams in an NCAA college basketball tournament to the social behavior of animals, SpringRank outperformed other ranking algorithms in predicting outcomes and in efficiency.

This question of how the collective influences individual performance is central to the work of SFI’s investigation into the limits of human performance. In a workshop that takes place June 25-27, experts from a range of disciplines, including physiology, organizational behavior, sports analytics and applied mathematics, explore how the collective affects the individual.

Recent breakthroughs in nonequilibrium statistical physics have revealed opportunities to advance the "thermodynamics of computation," a field that could have far-reaching consequences for how we understand, and engineer, our computers.

The latest scientific understanding of time, and how time shapes our experience, were subjects of a June 19 panel discussion between physicist James Hartle, cosmologist Sean Carroll, evolutionary theorist David Krakauer, and science writer Jenniffer Ouellette. Watch the panel discussion.

SFI Professor David Wolpert has been included in a NASA Group Achievement Award for his work on the Machine Learning and Data Sciences Team.

An SFI workshop brings together thinkers in disciplines ranging from cosmology to chronobiology to neuroscience to explore how different timescales emerge.

On June 11, the SFI Press released the second volume in its Seminar Series, The Emergence of Premodern States, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and Paula L.W. Sabloff. This project tackles one of the most deceptively simple inquiries in archaeology: How did humans transition from hunter-gatherer societies into states — collective entities that are the movers and shakers of the modern world?

This week at SFI, scientists from fields ranging from hydrology and environmental engineering to political science and economics explore the interplay of environmental conditions and society around water.

An SFI working group meets to sort through the many ways to think about cumulative cultural evolution.  

An SFI team led by Professor Mirta Galesic has received a nearly $500,000 grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study how people form beliefs about genetically modified crops.

External Professor Constantino Tsallis has been elected as a member of the Academia de Ciencias de America Latina

SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales has won the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Montaigne Medal for his bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.

We humans make social judgments about ourselves and others that can appear contradictory. A new Social Sampling Model, presented by Professor Mirta Galesic and External Professor Henrik Olsson, suggest these apparently conflicting judgments can be explained by a single quantitative theory. 

David Pines, a central figure in understanding the elemental properties of condensed matter and who played a major role in birthing complexity science and founding the Santa Fe Institute, passed away May 3, 2018.

SFI Trustee and writer Cormac McCarthy has been awarded the Humanities Prize by the School of Humanities and Education at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. The prize recognizes McCarthy’s “deep and important contribution in the understanding of Mexico-USA relations through” his books like Blood Meridian and his Border trilogy.

A new proof by SFI Professor David Wolpert sends a humbling message to would-be super intelligences: you can’t know everything all the time.

SFI Science Board member Richard Lenski has been elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

SFI External Professors Mahzarin Banaji and Pablo Marquet join the National Academy of Sciences.

"Algorithmic Information Dynamics: From Networks to Cells," is a new online course that will introduce students to tools that allow them to explore causal relationships in complex datasets. Register online through Complexity Explorer.

SFI will be inaugurating a new annual tradition June 7-8 — the InterPlanetary Festival, which will render Santa Fe’s Railyard district a platform for imagining future human civilizations, on and beyond Earth.