News + Events

This year, the annual postdocs’ gathering is a retreat not from SFI’s day-to-day calm, but to a recreation of it. Sheltered by strict safety protocols, the 'Pandemic Pod' is taking place in person.

Ecology is traditionally a data-poor discipline, but tiny microbial worlds offer the quantity of data needed to solve universal questions about abundance and diversity. New research by Jacopo Grilli reveals the fundamental relationship between the environment and the species present in a microbial community and can be used as a starting point for investigating bigger systems.

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.

By using transmission to our advantage, we can eliminate coronavirus through citizen-based medicine.

NPR’s David Brancaccio is hosting a free, virtual book club around the CORE team's introductory econ textbook.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

SFI’s “social reactor” kicked into overdrive this summer, welcoming 163 undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. Intensive summer programs form the core of the Institute’s educational programming, bringing future complexity scholars to Santa Fe to train with leading scientists. This year, the Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science and Complexity (GWCSS) celebrated its 25th anniversary with programming for alumni as well as a new cohort of advanced graduate students.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a solid history of how we got from pocket calculators to facial recognition and self-driving cars, a lucid tour of how these systems operate, and a measured warning against placing more trust in these systems than they deserve.

The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution is one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory. But a new paper by Sam Bowles and  Jung-Kyoo Choi shows that most explanations for it don’t agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation.

Jessica Flack presents an SFI Community Lecture on collective computation at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on October 22.

External Professor Raissa D’Souza has won the Network Science Society’s inaugural Euler award for her influential work in "the discovery and study of explosive percolation in networks and the insights it provided to explosive synchronization and network optimization.”

SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur has been selected as a 2019 Citation Laureate by the Web of Science group “for research revealing network effects in economic systems that produce increasing returns."

A television production written and hosted by SFI Professor Cris Moore won a 2019 Rocky Mountain Emmy Award in the instructional/informational category.

For over a century, anthropologists have attempted to describe human societies as “matrilineal” or “patrilineal” — emphasizing relatedness among women or men, respectively. A new paper by Laura Fortunato, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, argues that it is time to confront the ambiguity at the heart of these terms.  

SFI's free online course, Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos with College of the Atlantic professor David Feldman, begins Oct. 1. Topics to be covered include: phase space, bifurcations, chaos, the butterfly effect, strange attractors, and pattern formation.