News + Events

SFI's summer undergraduate research program celebrates three decades this year.

Applications are open through March 15, 2023 for the Complexity–GAINs International Summer School, to be held in Cambridge, UK on August 13-25

This summer, 38 Ph.D. students from the U.S. and Europe gathered in Vienna, Austria, for SFI’s first Complexity-GAINs international summer school to better understand the dynamics of societies, with an eye toward preventing disintegration.

Our financial, supply, energy, belief, and political systems are undergoing regime shifts. On October 3, SFI researchers and members of ACtioN and SFI’s Complexity Society met to explore these regime shifts from a complex systems perspective.

After two years of online-only and postponed events, SFI's summer education programs are back in person. June brought students from around the world to participate in the Undergraduate Complexity Research, Complex Systems Summer School, Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science, and Advanced Graduate Workshop programs. 

In a time of climate change, inequality, polarization, and pandemic, what does it mean to be “useful?” This question from SFI President David Krakauer kicked off SFI’s live online course Complexity Interactive, which ran January 10 – 28, 2022. Is it better for complex systems scientists to keep their advice simple and be understood, or to advocate for complexity and nuance yet risk that no one will listen?

SFI and EU partners launch International Summer School focused on social disintegration. Applications open through January 18, 2022.

In an age where it's easier to get on social media than off of it, we still know shockingly little about how the scope, speed, and structure of online communication forums impact beliefs about stock market investing. This October, SFI partners with UBS to host a virtual topical meeting titled “Technology and Risk: Will Speedier and Deliberate Communication Bring Higher Levels of Risk?”

To solve our most intractable and pressing scientific problems, humanity needs the best possible science to innovate solutions. The best possible science is science that is open, reproducible, replicable, transparent, and inclusive, says Open Science advocate and SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Helena Miton.

This summer, participants in SFI's education programs joined newly appointed external faculty member Marco Buongiorno Nardelli to create and perform a unique piece of music based on features of complex systems.

The Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science (GWCSS) has been a core feature of summers at SFI for a quarter-century. This year, in response to the ongoing pandemic, the 26th GWCSS was condensed into two intensive and productive days online, and students completed a homework problem centered around a question of contemporary significance.

On September 1, SFI will launch a new “NEH institute,” Foundations and Applications of Humanities Analytics, to introduce early-career humanities scholars to new ways of studying culture with a wide range of computational tools.

Complexity Explorer unveils a brand-new course on the many faces of computational complexity, with SFI Professor Cris Moore. The content is appropriate for learners from any background (and no mathematical heavy lifting required).

In an analysis published in the journal PLOS One, alumni of the iconic Complex Systems Summer School took a close look at collaboration among a total of 823 participants who attended summer schools from 2005 to 2019.

The crisis of COVID-19 exposed both weaknesses and opportunities in American education. These were the subject of an online SFI flash workshop on “Education, Equity, and Technology.”

At SFI’s Applied Complexity roundtable in March, SFI External Professor and MIT economist Andrew Lo spoke about “market adaptation” and applied a complex ecological and evolutionary lens to the market’s behavior under COVID.

A review paper published in this week's Evolutionary Anthropology seeks to reconcile competing approaches in the sciences of human behavior.

The Santa Fe Institute is accepting applications for Complexity Interactive (SFI-CI) — an advanced, guided online course in complex systems. Graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and research professionals are encouraged to apply by March 31.

What types of infrastructure improvements will it take to speed the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs)? In a Nature Energy paper published January 21, SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik and her co-authors at MIT report a new methodology designed to identify which locations for vehicle charging stations could be prioritized

Scientists rarely have the historical data they need to see exactly how nodes in a network became connected. But a new paper by SFI's George Cantwell offers hope for reconstructing the missing information, using a new method to evaluate the rules that generate network models.