News + Events

In an essay for Aeon magazine, SFI Professor Jessica Flack and SFI Davis Professor Melanie Mitchell describe how the COVID-19 pandemic prompts us to revisit the ways that complex systems retain stability in the biological world. By learning from biological systems, we can begin to shore up the vulnerability inherent in the complex systems that undergird human life.

SFI External Professor Ross Hammond and collaborators have developed a new agent-based computer model that helps policy-makers simulate multiple variations for re-opening. It can incorporate critical factors in determining how to contain COVID-19, such as variations in age, contact networks, activity patterns, and likelihood of infection.  

The COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as the first complexity crisis in history, Geoffrey West and David Krakauer write in an article for Nautilus. By capturing the kinds of tradeoffs that lie at the heart of complexity crises, complexity science can help us manage the pandemic’s long-term ramifications.

We must use a modeling approach to COVID-19 data that will yield the least biased inference and prediction.

When thinking about reopening schools, an important factor to consider is the rate of community transmission.

Well-mixed models do not protect the vulnerable in segregated societies.

Pandemics rapidly reshape the evolutionary and ecological landscape and have cascading social, economic, and other system-level effects.

The countervailing pressures of economic pain and disease containment are keeping the COVID-19 pandemic at a noisy equilibrium.

The COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to out-evolve the virus by evolving our own scientific ingenuity and social practices.

The concept of the extended phenotype provides a way to circumvent Landauer’s bound.

Forecasting ambiguity is inevitable in exponential growth processes that underlie epidemics.

COVID-19 lockdowns provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study wildlife in empty cities. 

Mechanism design can aid the market in meeting extraordinary needs under unusual circumstances.

Policies for responding to pandemics should be rooted in a scientific understanding of cities. 

R₀ is just an average: the transmission rate varies widely, and outbreaks can be surprisingly large even when the epidemic is subcritical. 

To make good decisions under uncertainty, decision-makers must act creatively to avoid paralysis, while recognizing the possibility of failure.

https://santafe.edu/people/profile/david-krakauerTest kits cannot exponentiate at the same rate as the virus. Unless we ramp up to 500K, the curve will flatten due to artifact.

The archaeological record can teach us much about cultural resilience and how to adapt to exogenous threats.

Exercise is a complex medicine that can make seniors less susceptible to frailty, and thus to COVID-19. To help the medicine go down, we need a systematic approach to improving the one technology that we know keeps people on task.