News + Events

AI and the Barrier of Meaning 2, a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute on April 24–26, brought together experts working in AI, cognitive science, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, and law. Videos of the talks from the workshop are now available on YouTube. Similar to the first AI and the Barrier of Meaning workshop, held in 2018, the event focused on questions related to “understanding” and what it means to “extract meaning” in a humanlike way.

A March 15 paper in Cell Reports Physical Science co-authored by External Professor Jessika Trancik (MIT) offers strategies to make electric-vehicle charging beneficial to the power grid.

In a paper in Scientific Reports, former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Gizem Bacaksizlar Turbic and SFI Professor Mirta Galesic tested compared the network structure of comments in four publications with varying political persuasions to test theories about the potential influence of a small group of voices. 

Information architectures — the rules and norms that govern the spread of information — likely serve a dominant force in shaping society. A May 9–11 workshop met to explore a host of emerging questions around information architectures and their impact on our lives.

Curiosity is far more than a single-minded pursuit of knowledge or understanding, argue SFI External Professor Dani Bassett (University of Pennsylvania) and Perry Zurn (American University) in their new book, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection. Rather, curiosity is the product of networks, connecting the dots in unexpected ways. 

Human innovations often arise "ahead of their time," but evolution, we’re told, innovates only in response to environmental conditions. In his new book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture, SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner urges us to consider another possibility. “What if,” he asks, “many innovations arise before their time,” in nature just as in human culture? 

In a new paper in PNAS, Eric Libby, Christopher Kempes, and Jordan Okie take a quantitative approach to begin tackling one of the great mysteries of biology: how eukaryotes arose. 

Most people think of a disease outbreak when they hear the word “contagion.” But it’s a concept that extends beyond pathogens. It could be an infectious disease, a fad, an online meme, or even a positive behavior in a population. An April 19–21 workshop will explore the dynamics of interacting contagions. 

Understanding higher-order interactions — phenomena that involve three or more entities — can be tricky, says SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang. In a new paper in Nature Communications, Zhang and his colleagues show how the choice of network representation can influence the observed effects.

As Covid roared through prisons in 2020, the U.S. prison population fell by as much as 30 percent, creating the largest, fastest reduction in prison population in American history. But this decarceration disproportionately benefited white incarcerated people, sharply increasing the fraction of incarcerated Black and Latino people. A new study in Nature shows that this increased racial disparity in U.S. prisons stems in large part from a long-standing problem with the justice system: Non-white people tend to get longer sentences than white people for the same crimes.

In times of crisis, groups of people respond in a variety of ways — with sometimes vastly different outcomes. A company might be resilient during a recession while another business fails. Some groups refused to get vaccinated for COVID-19, remaining more vulnerable to the virus, while others quickly adopted the new vaccine. Why do some communities and organizations struggle to respond deftly to threats? A new paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface presents a new conceptual framework that could provide answers in the future.

AI research papers typically report only aggregate results, without the granular detail that will allow other researchers to spot important issues like errors in recognizing certain faces on racial and gender lines. In a new paper, SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell and co-authors explore this problem and suggest solutions. 

A new study co-authored by SFI Complexity Fellow Daniel Muratore takes a close look at the carbon-to-nitrogen ratios in marine microorganisms, with results that may lead researchers to rethink the role of these microorganisms in the oceanic carbon cycle.

ChatGPT knows how to use the word “tickle” in a sentence but it cannot feel the sensation. Can it then be said to understand the meaning of the word tickle the same way we humans do? In a paper for PNAS, SFI researchers Melanie Mitchell and David C. Krakauer survey the ongoing debate in which AI researchers are teasing apart whether Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM understand language in any humanlike sense.

SFI is hosting the 10th JSMF–SFI Postdocs in Complexity Conference from March 29–31. The biannual event provides a forum for postdoctoral fellows studying complex systems to share research ideas, develop new career skills, and expand their professional networks.

A March 15-17 working group brought a complex-systems lens to study the paradox of why human societies have increased in intricacy despite the second law of thermodynamics's wisdom that entropy increases over time. 

SFI Sabbatical Visitor Carlos Gershenson, a research professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, spends his sabbatical at SFI to finish work on his book Balance.

The specter of information is haunting the sciences. With these words, Wojciech H. Zurek invited fellow scientists to attend the 1989 Santa Fe Institute workshop on which the proceedings volume Complexity, Entropy & the Physics of Information was based. In a two-volume reprint, the SFI Press offers an affordable and accessible update to the original text, with a new preface from attendee Seth Lloyd that contextualizes the significance of this record of a meeting that marked the intersection of information, physics, complexity, and computation.

A February 22–24, 2023 working group explores the relationship between regeneration, robustness, and failure.

In the last 50 years, economic theory has come to be based almost solely on mathematics. This brings logical precision, but according to a new paper by SFI economist Brian Arthur, it restricts what economics can easily talk about.