News + Events

SFI congratulates two of its Science Board members, Marcus Feldman and Juris Hartmanis, who have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers have demonstrated quantum illumination in the lab, a technique first proposed in 2008 by SFI Science Board member and External Professor Seth Lloyd, according to a paper published in Nature.

A feature in the May issue of Smithsonian reviews the birth at SFI of the growing field of "quantitative urbanism" and its progress toward an improved theoretical, mathematical understanding of cities.

SFI External Professor Aaron Clauset is among a small group of scientists beginning to use statistical tools from seismology and physics to forecast future patterns of war and terrorism.

Wikipedia's remarkable accuracy and usefulness comes from something larger than the sum of its written contributions, a new study by SFI Research Fellow Simon DeDeo finds.

Whether it’s a food web, a social community, or a power grid, a network can feature millions of members, each with a specific role to play amid countless interactions. The mathematical study of these connections, network science, has a lot to offer other fields.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded the Santa Fe Institute a two-year, $300,000 grant to support the Institute’s scientific activities, including workshops, working groups, and scientific visits, and to explore new research areas and expand the breadth of its international scientific community.

Marcus Hamilton, an anthropologist, is working with SFI’s scaling group in search of these statistical signatures. From its analysis of large data sets for contemporary and traditional societies, the group has found that as human populations change in size from small tribes to cities of millions, economies of scale emerge at each level of growth, suggesting, for example, that large populations are more efficient at procuring energy for their members and distributing it among them.

Jameson Toole, a 2009 participant in SFI's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, sees cell phones as little sensors with big potential, according to a feature in MIT News.

SFI Research Fellow Simon DeDeo comments on a recent paper in Physical Review Letters that proffers a mathematical explanation for intelligent behavior based on entropy.

The Atlantic's Emily Badger asks whether mathematical scaling relationships found in past SFI research can be extended to natural space, such as parks and tree cover.

In revisiting whether the productivity of cities is linked most directly to city size or population density, Forbes contributor Joel Kotkin cites SFI research.

Three SFI-affiliated scientists -- Jessica Green, Scott Page, and Patricia McAnany -- are among 175 U.S. and Canadian scholars, artists, and scientists named today as 2013 Guggenheim Fellows.

SFI researchers are building improved models capable of capturing the financial behavior of millions of households, companies, and governments playing roles in an economy.

In a recent SFI seminar, Aaron Clauset introduces a model that can quantify a competition's scoring tempo and balance and uses the model to draw interesting new conclusions about the relationship between a game's structure and dynamics.

In trying to optimize a data-rich process using many sources of information, scientists traditionally have used their intuitions to choose from information sources on the fly. SFI External Professor David Wolpert wants to let machines do it instead.

SFI researchers are drawing on information theory and a couple of remarkable datasets – hundreds of years of courtroom transcripts and thousands of military action reports – to discover hidden patterns in information.

A recent SFI working group explored new ways to examine data from hundreds of instances of particular types of food webs to study how species resist or adjust to changing ecological contexts.

Climate change could alter the balance of temperature and moisture needed for grape growing and shift the global geography of wine production, according to a study published in PNAS and co-authored by SFI External Professor Pablo Marquet.

A recent SFI workshop on "Network Structure and Inequality" examined social network structure as a way to make predictions about how the distribution of wealth changes over time in human societies.