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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 three days this fall, biologists, physicists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists gather for an SFI workshop to investigate the links between computational theory and biological systems. 

Infectious disease outbreaks often emerge when and where we are least equipped to detect and control them. In a series of two lectures, SFI External Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers discusses how network-based mathematical models data accelerate the detection and containment of outbreaks.
 

Reckless Ideas will feature high on the agenda of the sixth Postdocs in Complexity Conference, the latest in a twice-yearly series held at SFI and generously funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF). The conference, to take place Aug. 27-30, brings together early-career complexity postdoctoral fellows in a wide range of disciplines from institutions around the world.

On August 21-22, SFI celebrates Stuart Kauffman’s contributions to complex systems science in the workshop “Thirty Years of Complex Systems Thinking.” The two-day workshop covers new research linked to Kauffman’s adventurous career.

Tuesday, August 27, evolutionary biologist and journalist Olivia P. Judson discussed the patterns of life throughout Earth's history.

Aug. 5-7, SFI hosts its second working group on cumulative cultural evolution, led by Vanessa Ferdinand, Rob Boyd, and Bill Thompson.

Today’s quantum computers sustain temperatures approaching absolute zero and are designed to solve problems that would require millions of years for even the world’s best supercomputers. However, the rate of hardware development is seemingly outpacing the growth of algorithms that can leverage the phenomena of quantum mechanics. A July 30 through Aug. 2 working group aims to address this shortage of algorithms.

An incoming editorial team for a flagship political science journal aims to confront race and gender. They met at the Santa Fe Institute July 17-19, 2019 for a brainstorming retreat.

Tuesday, July 9, computer scientist Sabine Hauert discussed how individual actions give rise to swarm behaviors, and the challenges researchers face when engineering swarms for desired applications.

A June working group meets to learn more about how public opinion changes, and how quickly.

The second annual InterPlanetary Festival lands June 14-16, 2019 in Santa Fe’s Railyard Park.