News + Events

As the Institute approaches its 30th year, a group of distinguished scientists recently took time to revisit and build on questions of emergence.

Graduate students and postdocs participating in SFI's 2013 Complex Systems Summer School collaborated to develop some 15 original research papers. See their research.

An article in the Science Careers section of the journal Science describes the challenges of cross-disciplinary collaboration, mentioning SFI as a research center that has successfully formalized the practice of working across disciplines.

SFI's Murray Gell-Mann discusses what it means to think like a scientist, the value of rejecting orthodoxy, complex systems science and theory, and intelligent life on other planets, among other topics.

SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur explores how new technology is created, and how closely evolutionary processes in technology mirror those from biology.

"Equilibrium is dead," says SFI Business Network member Tim Hodgson of Towers Watson, in an article about the role of complex systems thinking in investment.

An article in The Guardian about ways to build sustainable cities offers advice from several experts, beginning with SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt.

Network theorists usually assume blackouts spread the same way diseases do – by close contact – but for power grids “the relevant network is not the physical network” of lines and towers and transfer stations, says SFI Professor Cris Moore.

SFI is seeking nominations and applications for the Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics. Apply by November 1, 2013.

In a column in Forbes, SFI Trustee John Chisholm asks whether the theoretical, scientific study of complex systems can inform the hardscrabble world of start-up firms.

External Professor David Wolpert joined SFI's resident faculty on a half-time basis on Monday, September 9, 2013. He also is a member of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Information Sciences Group.

Wikipedia acts a bit like one big brain, its editors working independently, yet somehow together performing an enormous cooperative computation, according to an article about Simon DeDeo's research.

In a recent paper, SFI's Marcus Hamilton and colleagues examined 296 projectile points from two New Mexico clusters of Clovis artifacts, linking the two encampments by the workmanship and materials.

The city is no longer just a place but a living field of information to be harvested, according to an article that cites early work at SFI to see if Kleiber's Law helped describe cities.

Harper's Jeff Madrick pans 40 years of "dubious" economic policies originating at Harvard and reviews the history of "alternative economics," starting with SFI Professor Sam Bowles's move from Harvard to UMass Amherst in 1972.

A three-week workshop at SFI ending today assembled economists, biologists, physicists, engineers, archaeologists, and anthropologists for discussions about new ways to quantify, analyze, and model technological development.

An August SFI working group, “Big Data In the Brain,” focused on the brain and how it manages large amounts of data – as well as the mapping of the brain itself, another kind of big data challenge.

SFI announced today that biologist Michael Lachmann will join the Institute’s resident faculty next summer. Lachmann currently is an assistant professor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

IEEE Spectrum notes recent research by scientists at SFI and MIT that examined price and performance data for 62 technologies across a broad range of industries.

In an analysis published in PLOS One, SFI External Professor Carl Bergstrom and collaborators show that despite encouraging progress, subtle gender disparities persist in academia.