News + Events

This week at SFI, researchers take a quantitative look at an age-old question: to what extent is human history shaped by impersonal trends, big ideas, and great leaders?

In an op-ed for Fast Company, External Professor James Evans (University of Chicago) and his colleagues demonstrate that when organizations and individuals succeed after failure they follow a distinct path.

What would happen if neural networks were explicitly trained to discard useless information, and how to tell them to do so, is the subject of recent research by SFI's Artemy Kolchinsky, Brendan Tracey, and David Wolpert.

A new model of how animals budget their energy sheds light on how they live and explains why they tend to evolve toward larger body sizes.

A special issue of Isis, compiled by SFI's Manfred Laubichler and his colleagues, takes stock of the growing field of computational history.

Whether we decide to take out that insurance policy, buy Bitcoin, or switch jobs, many economic decisions boil down to a fundamental gamble about how to maximize our wealth over time. How we understand these decisions is the subject of a new perspective piece in Nature Physics that aims to correct a foundational mistake in economic theory.

In a paper published in Economics Letters, SFI's Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin propose a novel twist on the widely used Gini coefficient—a workhorse statistical measure for gauging the gap between haves and have-nots.   

At the culmination of SFI's November symposium, Bill Miller cut the ribbon to inaugurate the newly renovated Miller Campus.

In November of 2019, 14 SFI postdocs withdrew to an isolated research location to accomplish, in just 72 hours, a monumental task — decoding the first complex communication from an alien civilization.

A working group, held November 18-20 at SFI, is beginning to unpack the causes, timescales, and consequences of sleep. In particular, participants are focusing on how sleep time changes across species, and how it changes with age and during adulthood.

An SFI working group meets November 4-5 to explore phase transitions in viruses.

A group of biologists think that a new synthesis in evolutionary theory might help answer the question of how life’s progenitor originally emerged. A working group, meeting November 13-15, brings together evolutionary theorists and experimentalists to explore which evolutionary models might best explain how chemical systems become biological systems.

The Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees welcomes Vijay Ullal of Seabed VC.

In his quarterly column, SFI President David Krakauer asks how economics, a social science, could experience the revolutions and refutations that characterize progress in the natural sciences.

In The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design, SFI External Professor Michael Kearns and his University of Pennsylvania colleague Aaron Roth offer a set of principled solutions based on the emerging science of socially aware algorithm design.

Melanie Mitchell presented an SFI Community Lecture on artificial intelligence at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on November 12.

On October 18, a group of ten computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars from the Santa Fe Institute and The University of New Mexico submitted a formal response to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) proposal to dramatically revise the Fair Housing Act.

External Professor Allison Stanger’s book Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump is garnering significant media attention.

Through the new Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship, which launched September 1, SFI is bridging the gap between academia and industry.

During Earth’s last glacial period, temperatures on the planet periodically spiked dramatically and rapidly. A new paper in the journal Chaos by SFI's Joshua Garland, Liz Bradley, and coauthors suggests that mathematics from information theory could offer a powerful tool for analyzing and understanding them.