News + Events

An SFI Working Group meets to explore the big picture on viruses, from infections of single cells to epidemics among populations.

An SFI workshop explores the evolutionary consequences of developmental bias — the tendency of organisms to evolve some phenotypes more readily than others.

The Dynamic Multi-System Resilience in Human Aging working group meets in November to discuss new data on the aging process, and how to understand the physiological and psychological systems that lead to resilience in elderly people.

Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President Geoffrey West has been awarded the 2018 Los Alamos Medal by Los Alamos National Laboratory “for his groundbreaking contributions to science.”

In a November SFI Community Lecture, External Professor Michelle Girvan described an exciting new approach to predicting chaotic systems. Watch her talk here.

A study co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Jacopo Grilli sheds new light on a long-standing question about what triggers cell division.

Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems synthesizes hundreds of disparate findings in complexity and articulates a single, underlying characteristic of complex systems.

Identifying meaningful information is a key challenge to disciplines from biology to artificial intelligence. In a new paper, SFI's Artemy Kolchinsky and David Wolpert propose a broadly applicable, fully formal definition for this kind of semantic information.

Sending instantaneous messages across long distances, or quickly computing over ungodly amounts of data are just two possibilities that arise if we can design computers to exploit quantum uncertainty, entanglement, and measurement. In this SFI Community Lecture, scientist Christopher Monroe describes the architecture of a quantum computer based on individual atoms, suspended and isolated with electric fields, and individually addressed with laser beams.

Frances Arnold, who served on the Santa Fe Institute’s Science Board from 1995-2000, received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year.

October 13-16, graduate students can meet with leading scientists to learn about modeling and evaluating the future of human populations and their environments. Free tuition for accepted students. Apply before July 11, 2018.

An SFI workshop examines the key impediments to building machines that understand meaning, and how much understanding is necessary for artificially intelligent machines to approach human-level abilities in language, perception, and reasoning.

Two October meetings at SFI aim to dig into some of the trickiest questions about life, both here on Earth, and how we might recognize it elsewhere in the universe.

The autumn Applied Complexity Network meeting “Risk: Retrospective Lessons and Prospective Strategies,” explores what we have learned since the financial crisis of 2008.

In a two-part lecture series September 24 and 25, SFI Professor Cristopher Moore looked at two sides of computation — the mathematical structures that make problems easy or hard, and the growing debate about fairness in algorithmic predictions. The videos are now available.

Quantitative tools developed in math and physics to understand bifurcations in dynamical systems could help ecologists and biologists better understand — and predict — tipping points in animal societies.

Watch The Majesty of Music & Math, a multi-media collaboration between SFI's Cristopher Moore and The Santa Fe Symphony, and produced by New Mexico PBS.  

The fourth bi-annual Postdocs in Complexity Conference at the Santa Fe Institute provides networking opportunities for early career researchers working on complex systems science, as well as special sessions from SFI faculty and other prominent speakers. This three-day conference will build on the themes of the previous three Postdocs in Complexity meetings, refining the structure to allow additional time to build community and focus on collaborations.

One of the first-movers in game theory, SFI External Professor Martin Shubik died August 22, 2018. He was 92 years old.

The bane of the language-learner is a goldmine for linguists, cultural evolutionists, and computer scientists, a group of whom will meet at SFI Aug. 27–28, 2018. Given the messy state of linguistic affairs, they ask, is it possible to quantitatively encode “meaning” independent of any particular language?