News + Events

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.

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.

Ashley Teufel and Luis Zaman's working group, “The Point of No Return,” seeks to identify the underlying properties driving entrenchment, a phenomenon in which a single event can have a widespread effect on an entire system, and find ways to infer, predict or even control it.

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.

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.

SFI's Sidney Redner and Paul Krapivsky of Boston University have a new mathematical take on a classic problem.  

Seven thousand years ago, societies across Eurasia began to show signs of lasting divisions between haves and have-nots. In new research published in the journal Antiquity, scientists chart the precipitous surge of prehistoric inequality and trace its economic origins back to the adoption of ox-drawn plows.

Why it is that only some crimes supercharge from city size is explained in a new paper published this week in Physical Review E.  According to Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Vicky Chuqiao Yang and her coauthors, the same underlying mechanism that boosts urban innovation and startup businesses can also explain why certain types of crimes thrive in a larger population.       

In a Topical Meeting for Applied Complexity Network (ACTioN) members, SFI delves into the complexity of commerce, September 12.