Murray Gell-Mann, SFI Distinguished Professor and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics was one of the originators of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary research center in New Mexico that is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Gell-Mann recently addressed a group of about 150 high school students gathered at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., for Adventures of the Mind, a biennial summit for academically outstanding 15- to 18-year-olds. Gell-Mann described the origins of and philosophy behind the Santa Fe Institute’s approach to science.
Selected from more than 300 nominees by a panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review, the TR35 is an elite group of accomplished young innovators who exemplify the spirit of innovation. Their work - spanning medicine, computing, communications, nanotechnology, and more - is changing our world.
SFI External Professor Douglas White and colleagues present their research into finding an approach to facilitate the design of policies in the complexity of economic networks. The research into economic networks has been studied by two perspectives: sociology and physics or computer science. White and colleagues describe what is needed in order to be able to predict and propose economic policies. With computational models, large-scale network date can be processed quickly and can reflect agent interactions.
Former SFI Professor Brian Goodwin has died at the age of 78. Goodwin was a mathematician, scientist, philosopher, biologist, writer and professor of outstanding caliber and influence. Goodwin became enthralled by the notion that organisms live at the “edge of chaos” and through SFI he began research into complexity theory. His work at SFI led to his writing the book, Signs of Life, with coauthor Ricard Sole, which outlines how the mathematics of chaos and non-linear dynamics can be applied to all aspects of the living world.
Researchers have identified thousands of macromolecular interactions within cells, but joining them up in networks and figuring out how they work still poses a big challenge. Recently, improved methods and refinements in the computational tools used in modelling signaling pathways have helped researchers. To see protein interactions in different cell types, scientists are advancing the use of affinity-purification chromatography followed by mass spectrometry. Harvard University professor and SFI External Professor, Walter Fontana has co-founded a company called Plectix BioSystems and a web-based system called Cellucidate. Gordon Webster, vice-president of biology at Plectix says, “The model mirrors the behavior of the living system it represents: the biology that emerges from our models is the combinatorial expression of all these automata doing their own little thing — just the way it is in the cell.”
Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a computerized simulation of agents interacting through given rules. ABM is used in tracking diseases and simulating behavioral patterns among societies, but has not been as well developed with financial and economic issues. Now many economists are working together with physicists and computer scientists to create ABMs with the financial markets in focus. NASDAQ chief Mike Brown hired BiosGroup to develop an ABM for the stock market. But the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) still do not use ABMs. SFI External Professor and computational social scientist Rob Axtell states, “When the SEC changes trading rules, it typically has either flimsy or modest support from econometric evidence for the action, or else no empirical evidence and the change is driven by ideology. You have to wonder why Mike Brown is doing this, while the SEC isn’t.” SFI External Professor John Geanakoplos, Farmer and colleagues have developed an ABM to explore how leverage affects fluctuations in stock prices. An ABM for the whole economy would take time and a lot of data of multidisciplinary collaborations of economists, psychologists, computer scientists, biologists and others. Axtell also says to this point, “Left to their own devices, academic macroeconomists will take a generation to make this transition. But if policy-makers demand better models, it can be accomplished more quickly.”
Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a computerized simulation of agents interacting through given rules. ABM is used in tracking diseases and simulating behavioral patterns among societies, but has not been as well developed with financial and economic issues. SFI Resident Professor J. Doyne Farmer and SFI External Professor Duncan Foley present ABM could certainly be used on the complex system of financial economics. SFI External Professor John Geanakoplos, Farmer and colleagues have developed an ABM to explore how leverage affects fluctuations in stock prices. An ABM for the whole economy would take time and a lot of data of multidisciplinary collaborations of economists, psychologists, computer scientists, biologists and others. But it would be worth the work for a forecast that may help our economy.
Epidemic modeling has been used in mapping epidemics since the 1920s. But in order to catch up to the times, new modeling techniques need to be utilized. Agent-based models (ABMs) are suited for today’s complex social networks. The agents are tracked and can be programmed to behave like real people. SFI External Professor Joshua Epstein is one of the scientists using the new Global-Scale Agent Model (GSAM) which was developed at the Brookings Institution’s Center on Social and Economic Dynamics. This model has 6.5 billion agents that can be tracked. The GSAM has been presented to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. With the pandemic of H1N1 and other diseases, agent-based modeling will play an integral part in assisting authorities to track possible outcomes and solutions.
The emerging field of network science focuses on studying complex systems and how they are all alike. Understanding one network may shed light on other networks. Scientists from a variety of different disciplines have gone deeper into researching complex systems. SFI External Professor and physicist Mark Newman started working in the field ten years ago with SFI and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Network science has opened the door to interdisciplinary training in complex systems. Many researchers take these courses through SFI, a leader in interdisciplinary studies and complex network science. Many agencies, including the US National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and even the military have made donations and funding available to continue research into network science and complex systems.
Several dozen graduate students and researchers pursuing careers that could help humans prosper on a thriving planet have gathered in Santa Fe for the first “Summer School on Global Sustainability,” developed by the Santa Fe Institute with help from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Mathematicians, statisticians and political scientists are now using statistical techniques to find election fraud. The accounting technique called, Benford’s Law, has potential to find election fraud if people made up the numbers. SFI Postdoctoral Fellow and computer scientist, Aaron Clauset, thinks people may evade detection under Benford’s Law by making up numbers that fit with the real numbers. Other researchers and political scientists think it would be a challenging and slow process to make their numbers fit the Benford Law. People who are cheating and creating election fraud do not have the time to make numbers fit, especially with counts being posted to the Internet, blogs and electric journals very quickly. While this may catch evidence of election fraud in Iran’s election, some researchers say we should be focusing on the U.S. election system, which is also flawed.
SFI Professor and senior scientist at the Department of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History, Douglas H. Erwin, recently reviewed the book, Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, edited by Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis. The first part of the book is comprised of 16 essays on topics ranging from origins of life to the relation of evolution to society and religion. The remainder of this book contains an encyclopedia containing 200 short essays. Erwin notes many informed readers will wonder why some of the bigger names in the field are missing from the book and why certain ones are included. To summarize his review of this book, Erwin states, “For students and the general public, many of the essays in this volume provide useful introductions to a number of central issues in evolution, and the shorter contributions are a ready reference on a wide range of topics.”
Dr. Jeremy Sabloff will join the Institute August 1 to lead SFI’s cutting-edge research community as it celebrates its 25th Anniversary. “We are delighted Jerry has accepted our offer,” says Bill Miller, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Legg Mason Capital Management and Chairman of SFI’s Board of Trustees. “We need a broad and deep intellectual to build SFI’s scientific footprint and Jerry uniquely combines an understanding of our multidisciplinary science with executive level administrative and fundraising experience."
This month 20 secondary school science teachers from around the country are attending an SFI workshop to learn the latest on the chemical origins of life and the development of modern genetic code. They then will take the ideas, tools, and inspiration from the workshop back to their students this fall.
Virgil Griffith, the creator of WikiScanner, has spent the past four summers as an undergraduate researcher at SFI. WikiScanner is a program that lets you see who is editing content in Wikipedia. Griffith began his work on WikiScanner while at SFI. This WikiScanner program has busted Wal-Mart and several other major corporations editing and removing content from the Wikipedia entry of their companies. Griffith has been drawn to SFI since he was in high school. He always wanted to be “where all the really smart crazies are.” And as SFI President Geoffrey West said, “He’s certainly one of our crazy smart people. He’s very interesting and he’s very SFI-ish.” Griffith will spend all of September at SFI continuing work on his plethora of projects.
Mobile phones are being used to collect data for a variety of different disciplines and SFI Omidyar Fellow, Nathan Eagle, is studying human movement and behavior through mobile phones. In an experiment at MIT, Eagle studied call logs of 100 students and staff and found he could sort the business students from other majors with 96% accuracy. Eagle is going to experiment on a larger scale next by studying millions of mobile phone users throughout Europe and parts of East Africa. Part of his study is to see if certain phone behaviors can help alert public health officials in the early stages of disease outbreaks.
SFI researcher, Virgil Griffith, created a program called WikiScanner, which tracks computers used to make changes and edits to Wikipedia entries. WikiScanner revealed CIA and FBI computers were used to edit topics on the Iraq War and the Guantanamo prison. WikiScanner also found computers at other organizations were used to edit topics related to them.
SFI postdoctoral fellow Elhanan Borenstein and collaborators have used a technique called “reverse ecology” to see what life was like on Earth millions of years ago. By studying the genome and metabolic networks of an organism, Borenstein and colleagues were able to see the organism’s environment and how it relates to other species. This information could then be utilized on a larger scale to figure out the environmental events throughout millions of year of life on Earth.
The APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) region is hit by more geological and hydrometeorogical disasters than any other part of the world. SFI external professor, Mark Newman and colleagues found that of all people affected by disasters between 1975 and 2004; 43 percent live in Southern Asia and 41 percent live in Eastern Asia. For years researchers and scientists have been working on having more prediction structures readily available. A new tool from APEC Climate Centre in Korea may have found the answer. The Climate Information Tool Kit (CLIK) is a user-friendly interface that allows data to be retrieved for anywhere on earth.
SFI Chair of the Faculty and professor, David Krakauer was interviewed by Mary Charlotte on the Santa Fe Radio Café. Krakauer started the discussing by explaining the basics of theories, research, and science. He goes on to tell a history of Darwin and evolution. Throughout the interview, Krakauer also discusses how Darwin helps the scientific world today by research on diseases, vaccines, historical restructuring, and complex social systems.