News + Events

This fall, the Institute welcomes four new SFI Omidyar Fellows for 2014. Meet the new fellows.

As the means to smelt ores and produce bronze spread through Europe, the new technology was one small part of broader sweeping changes in agriculture, animal husbandry, warfare, traditions of construction and settlement, and trade.

Theoretical neuroscientists and mathematicians gathered at SFI recently to explore new ways to let “embodied intelligent systems” – that’s robots – learn coordination. At the small working group October 8-11, 2013 at SFI, nine researchers began hammering out a new theoretical approach for enabling robots to learn to walk, for example, in much the same way infants do.

For a few days in September, urban researchers, city planners, and representatives from international organizations and major corporations met at SFI to explore how Big Data can help them better understand and manage cities.

A recent SFI workshop for physicists and computer scientists sought to prompt collaboration on new algorithms for solving problems and modeling nature.

In a September 30 Business Network topical meeting in London, participants explored the evolution of the modern corporation, the corporate life cycle, the impact of globalization, and the relationship between corporations and other major social institutions.

Research led by SFI Chair of Faculty Jennifer Dunne is among 21 new projects being funded by the NSF to develop a better understanding of how humans and the environment interact.

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.

In an SFI Community Lecture in Santa Fe, Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein asked whether human moral progress is a gift of empathy and emotion or of reason and logic.

In a series of three lectures September 10-12 in Santa Fe, SFI’s Stephanie Forrest revealed surprising commonalities between computers and organisms, then described research that blurs the distinction further. Watch her talks.

Hundreds of 5th-8th grade girls spent Saturday, October 5, with New Mexico women who have chosen careers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computing.

In early 2013, Melanie Mitchell taught SFI’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). As she begins the course again, she offers her thoughts about the first MOOC and what the future holds for online courses in complexity.

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.

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.

In August, Lee was named director of SFI’s new Learning Lab, created this summer to support an important component of the Institute’s mission: inspiring the next generation of scientists. The Learning Lab will help translate SFI’s research for the general public, with an emphasis on students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

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.

The popular Science On Screen series continues Tuesday evening, August 20, in Santa Fe with SFI's Doyne Farmer and the 1974 quirky sci-fi cult film classic Zardoz.