News + Events

The July issue of Knowable Magazine published an interview with Jeremy Sabloff, External Professor Emeritus of SFI and past President of the Institute (2009-2015), about his work on “the archaeology of common folk,” which is reviewed in the 2019 Annual Review of Anthropology.

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, creator of SFI’s online education platform, was named co-chair of SFI’s Science Board at its 2019 spring meeting.

SFI Science Board member Derek Smith has worked in academia, industry, and public health. He is using insights from his work at SFI to develop an evolution-inspired flu vaccine.

SFI External Professor Raissa D’Souza (UC Davis) has joined the journal Physical Review Research as Lead Editor.

The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines, edited by David Wolpert, Chris Kempes, Peter Stadler, and Joshua Grochow, lays out recent advances that are driving a new “thermodynamics of computation.”

External Professor Stephanie Forrest and co-authors received the 2019 Ten-Year Most Influential Paper award from the International Conference on Software Engineering for their 2009 paper "Automatically Finding Patches Using Genetic Programming."

Former SFI Postdoc Jeremy Van Cleve, now an assistant professor of biology at the University of Kentucky, has received a CAREER award for early career faculty from the National Science Foundation.

Tuesday, July 9, computer scientist Sabine Hauert discussed how individual actions give rise to swarm behaviors, and the challenges researchers face when engineering swarms for desired applications.

Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier, events occurring with higher-than-expected probability. Using the same mathematical tools that describe stock market crashes, SFI researchers explain the evolutionary dynamics behind this universal pattern in the fossil record and uncover "a new normal."

In their essay for Aeon, External Professor Sara Walker and Professor Michael Lachmann argue that we would do well to understand life as a process of transmitting information.

In his new book Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity, SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner compares the tools of biological evolution with those of human innovation to make sense of the creative process that is happening in our minds all the time.

This summer marks the 25th anniversary of SFI’s Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science and Complexity. To learn what makes this annual event so special — and how it has evolved over a quarter century and more than 275 participants — we sat down with co-directors and founders John Miller and Scott Page.

To start addressing pressing questions raised by the proliferation of new crypto networks, SFI hosts a workshop on “Collective Crypto” June 13.

Borne out of a transdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute working group, Law as Data, edited by Michael Livermore and Dan Rockmore, explores the new field of computational legal analysis — the study of the law that uses legal texts as data.

How do you get an artificial intelligence to become more trustworthy? You teach it to think like a baby. The question and answer might read like a joke. Yet, as SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell explains in an essay for Aeon, teaching AI systems to think more like babies is one of the strategies that scientists are starting to deploy to create better AI.

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate who revealed symmetry and order in the world of subatomic particles and leveled his genius at complex mysteries of life and mind, died peacefully May 24, 2019. He was 89 years old.

The second annual InterPlanetary Festival lands June 14-16, 2019 in Santa Fe’s Railyard Park.

Agent-based modeling has been used to study everything from economics to biology to political science to business and management. This July, programmers and non-programmers alike can learn to model by enrolling in Introduction to Agent-based Modeling, an online course offered through SFI's Complexity Explorer.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019 physicist Jean Carlson discussed the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time.

In 2018, SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales won the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Montaigne Medal for his bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. He won another Eric Hoffer award in 2019 in the Legacy Nonfiction category for Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival.