News + Events

In a commentary this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, SFI colleagues Simon DeDeo and Elizabeth Hobson* discuss the science of social hierarchy — what rank is, what it does, and where it comes from.

Katherine Collins has been elected Chair and has appointed Ian McKinnon as Vice-Chair of the Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees. Their three-year appointments began May 3, 2021, following the board’s bi-annual meeting.

Darla Moore has been elected to the Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees, with a three-year appointment beginning in May 2021. Moore is the Founder and Chair of the Palmetto Institute, a not-for-profit think tank that aims to raise per capita income in South Carolina.

In an analysis published in the journal PLOS One, alumni of the iconic Complex Systems Summer School took a close look at collaboration among a total of 823 participants who attended summer schools from 2005 to 2019.

Michael Mauboussin, Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, retired from his 8 1/2-year chairmanship of SFI’s Board of Trustees following the board’s bi-annual meeting in May.

The human world is, increasingly, an urban one — and that means elevators. Two physicists saw this as an opportunity to explore the factors that determine elevator transport capabilities in their new paper in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics.

The crisis of COVID-19 exposed both weaknesses and opportunities in American education. These were the subject of an online SFI flash workshop on “Education, Equity, and Technology.”

By simulating the physiology and decisions of early way-finders, an international team of archaeologists, geographers, ecologists, and computer scientists has mapped the probable “superhighways” that led to the first peopling of the Australian continent some 50,000-70,000 years ago.

An SFI-authored paper on “Nonlinear Information Bottleneck” is one of four papers to win the 2021 Entropy Best Paper Awards. 

Underneath the apparent messiness of forests lurk extraordinary regularities, governed by the biological mechanisms that drive universal forces of growth, death, and competition.

Now that cases in New Mexico are declining and the vaccination campaign is in swing, the SFI postdoctoral fellows are regrouping for a second Pandemic Pod, from April 16 –  23. Like its predecessor, this second Pod involves strict testing and quarantine measures.

Data extracted from the oldest surviving document recording Korean history shows a strong correlation between extreme weather events and war.

SFI welcomes new postdoctoral fellow Maell Cullen

At SFI’s Applied Complexity roundtable in March, SFI External Professor and MIT economist Andrew Lo spoke about “market adaptation” and applied a complex ecological and evolutionary lens to the market’s behavior under COVID.

In a new editorial at The Conversation, SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik argues that climate disaster can be averted most efficiently if governments pave the way for technological innovation.

A mathematical model, validated on a large dataset of U.S. political surveys, predicts that when two groups form, both want to exclude those in the middle.

During the 2020-2021 fall semester, school districts around the United States navigated their reopening plans with little data on how SARS-CoV-2 spreads among children or how in-person learning would impact transmission in the schools’ communities. A new study in The Journal of School Health joins a growing body of evidence that, with appropriate measures, there are ways for schools to safely reopen.

New research reveals the geometry behind predictable scaling relationships that apply to cities worldwide. 

SFI researchers Dana Randall and Joshua Grochow were recently featured in Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, a prominent computation blog.

What makes something intelligent? Where is intelligence to be found? How is intelligence studied? SFI researchers Melanie Mitchell and Melanie Moses have organized a virtual conference in March that aims to answer questions about the foundations of intelligence from areas as diverse as philosophy to evolutionary intelligence and complex information processing.