Virtual offerings widen ACtioN’s network
SFI's Applied Complexity Network has ramped up virtual offerings, increasing participation amongst both ACtioN members and external SFI faculty.
The latest news and events at the Santa Fe Institute
SFI's Applied Complexity Network has ramped up virtual offerings, increasing participation amongst both ACtioN members and external SFI faculty.
Workshops and working groups are among the defining features of science at SFI, but the dividends sometimes follow months or years down the line.
Lauren Ancel Meyers and Sam Scarpino’s analyses inform critical, front-line decisions on pandemic response. Much of their work relies on quantitative methods of network epidemiology, which originated at SFI.
Like many events in the COVID era, the bi-annual Postdocs in Complexity conference has moved online. Participants continue to collaborate despite some of the inherent challenges.
New research shows that spider monkeys use collective computation to figure out the best way to find food.
SFI External Professor Ross Hammond and collaborators have developed a new agent-based computer model that helps policy-makers simulate multiple variations for re-opening. It can incorporate critical factors in determining how to contain COVID-19, such as variations in age, contact networks, activity patterns, and likelihood of infection.
We must use a modeling approach to COVID-19 data that will yield the least biased inference and prediction.
When thinking about reopening schools, an important factor to consider is the rate of community transmission.
Human cognition and cultural norms have changed the composition of human portraits, according to a new analysis of European paintings from the 15th to the 20th century. The study, led by SFI Omidyar Fellow Helena Miton, examined "bias" in 1831 paintings by 582 unique European painters.
A new technique could help identify prime candidates for changing election outcomes, or lead to a better understanding of how institutional and environmental factors shape the emergence of social structure.
External Professor Emeritus Constantino Tsallis and his colleague describe a single function that accurately describes all existing available data on active COVID-19 cases and deaths—and aims to predict forthcoming peaks.
New research into a massive archaeological dataset finds that the ability to store and process information was central to sociopolitical development across civilizations.
SFI Trustee Katherine Collins and ACtioN member Putnam Investments are co-hosting a Virtual Topical Meeting May 27-28 to explore how complexity science can inform sustainable investing. The meeting will bring investors together with leading climate and complexity scientists to discuss “The Complexity of Sustainability and Investing.”
On April 15, SFI hosted a flash discussion that focused on human behavior, incentives, and beliefs. The overarching message was that the financial and social fallout of the pandemic, while difficult to predict, will largely depend on actions at individual, community, and institutional levels.
Areas of the planet home to one-third of humans will become as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara within 50 years, unless greenhouse gas emissions fall, according to research by an international research team of archaeologists, ecologists, and climate scientists. The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, resulted from a 2018 SFI working group on climate change and the human "niche." It finds that rapid heating would mean that 3.5 billion people would live outside the temperature and humidity combinations in which humans have thrived for 6,000 years.
SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Anjali Bhatt, who holds an AB in physics from Harvard University and is completing a PhD in organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and blends organizational and cultural theories, which are grounded in sociology, with the mathematical models of evolutionary biology and the quantitative tools of computational linguistics.
SFI welcomes Progam Postdoctoral Fellow Jonas Dalege, who holds a PhD in psychology as well as a BSc and MSc from the University of Amsterdam and will work with SFI Professor Mirta Galesic and External Professor Henrik Olsson to develop a unifying theoretical framework that integrates two approaches to understanding our ability to develop and maintain beliefs.
SFI welcomes Program Postdoctoral Fellow Natalie Grefenstette, who holds a PhD in prebiotic chemistry from University College London and is working with Professor Chris Kempes on a NASA-funded Agnostic Biosignatures project.
SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Mingzhen Lu, a biogeochemist who holds a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University and a BS in geosciences from Peking University.
SFI welcomes Eddie Lee, a Program Postdoctoral Fellow working with SFI President David Krakauer and Professor Jessica Flack in the Collective Computation (C4) Group, who builds on his background in physics to study social phenomena.