News + Events

The beliefs we hold develop from a complex dance between our internal and external lives. A recent study published in Psychological Review uses well-known formalisms in statistical physics to model multiple aspects of belief-network dynamics. This multidimensional approach to modeling belief dynamics could offer new tools for tackling various real-world problems such as polarization or the spread of disinformation.

In The Complex World, the newest book from the SFI Press, SFI President David C. Krakauer offers readers a concise and comprehensive overview of complexity science, following its roots from the nineteenth-century science of machines — evolved and engineered — into the twentieth-century science of emergent systems.

SFI External Professor Orit Peleg (CU Boulder) has been named a “Schmidt Science Polymath” by the philanthropic organization Schmidt Sciences. Peleg is one of six awardees this year who will each receive $2.5 million over the next five years to pursue risky, novel ideas. 

It’s become easier than ever before to engage with content online, particularly with features like infinite scrolling. However, the smooth user experience of social media apps encourages superficial engagement. In turn, this has contributed to the spread of fake news, misinformation, and hate speech. A September 11–13 working group discusses the impacts of introducing friction in social media to help tackle these problems.

On August 19–23, SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell and SFI External Professor John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins University) led a working group on “The Nature of Intelligence.” It was the first in a series of six meetings to be held over the next three years. Scholars from diverse fields — neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and AI — were invited to investigate the broad notion of intelligence, whether in machines or biological systems. 

In his new SFI Press monograph, Complex-Systems Research in Psychology, SFI External Professor Han van der Maas offers a roadmap for how psychologists could adopt and apply complexity science.

Robert (Bob) Maxfield, who served on the SFI Board of Trustees for three decades, passed away on August 13, 2024, at the age of 82. An avid learner with many interests, Maxfield first heard of SFI in 1989 while he was studying economics on his own time. He was asking questions similar to those that Nobel laureates and other experts in physics and economics were discussing at SFI.

A new paper by Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kerice Doten-Snitker studies how government-sanctioned violence in medieval Germany diffused from one community to another. Doten-Snitker describes which factors encouraged the spread of Jewish expulsions in the Holy Roman Empire, and which had a dampening effect. 

External Faculty are central to SFI's identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to more than 70 institutions around the globe. This year, seven new researchers joined SFI's External Faculty.

In this “Ocean Decade,” as declared by the United Nations, we face an unprecedented wealth of data documenting the world's oceans. Gathered with tools from satellites to autonomous robots, what once was an information paucity now has become a glut. An August 12–14 working group gathers an international cohort of BioGeoSCAPES Fellows to propose top priorities for the next era of highly interdisciplinary ocean science. 

How did life come about on this planet? What forms might it take elsewhere? Assembly Theory provides a framework for understanding these questions, and in her new book, “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence,” SFI External Professor Sara Imari Walker proposes a search for the rules that may govern how life could exist here and elsewhere.

In a new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, SFI's Mirta Galesic and Henrik Olsson explore the benefits — and potential pitfalls — of several common analogies used to model belief dynamics. 

SFI External Professor Ole Peters (London Mathematical Laboratory) received the Freedom of the City of London on July 19, 2024. The Freedom is awarded to exemplary individuals whose work has contributed to the vibrancy of the City of London. Peters, a physicist who collaborated with SFI co-founders Murray Gell-Mann and Ken Arrow, was nominated for his contributions to the study of economics.

An SFI working group met July 22–24 to consider the role of contingency in complex adaptive systems beyond biology.

Humans’ complex cultures — our beliefs and biases, traditions and fads — can develop through interactions with each other and with our environments. SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton studies how cultural traits arise and spread, exploring the role of non-genetic processes in human evolution.

SFI’s External Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu has been recognized by Yale University with the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research.

Interactive Economics, a new, free platform, uses playful, dynamic lessons to deepen students' understanding of economics in a rapidly evolving world. The project, launched on April 11, was spearheaded by SFI External Professor Rajiv Sethi and Homa Zarghamee, colleagues at Barnard College. 

SFI External Faculty Member Constantino Tsallis has been elected to the European Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Getting individuals to act in the best interest of society can be a tricky balancing act, one that often walks a fine line between trying to convince people to act of their own volition, versus passing laws and regulations that make these actions compulsory. A new paper in PNAS Nexus presents a mathematical model and an agent-based model that shows the effectiveness of influencers who convince others to make decisions in the best interest of society.

For a billion years, single-celled eukaryotes ruled the planet. Then around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth — a geologic era when glaciers may have stretched as far as the equator — a new creature burst into existence: the multicellular organism. Why did multicellularity arise? Solving that mystery may help pinpoint life on other planets and explain the vast diversity and complexity seen on Earth today, from sea sponges to redwoods to human society.