News + Events

SFI External Professor Raissa D’Souza (UC Davis) has been elected as a 2024 Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing deeper into their profession. A recent paper in Nature Human Behavior mapped the dependency relationships between workplace skills, identifying a nested structure in many professions, where advanced skills depend on prior mastery of broader skills. This nestedness, they found, has significant implications for wage inequality and career mobility in increasingly complex labor markets.

Aiming to chart a more sustainable path for governing our nation’s grid, representatives spanning physics, law, energy regulation, economics, and even evolutionary dynamics is meeting April 9–11 at SFI for a working group on “Governance Institutions for a Polycentric and Technologically Complex Electric Power Grid.” 

To avoid the unintended consequences of climate policy, we need to better understand how climate policies and people’s values coevolve. A recent working group led by Katrin Schmelz and Sam Bowles met to investigate. 

Over the past three years, C. Brandon Ogbunu has become a familiar face at SFI as an External Professor. In February, he joined SFI as a part-time Resident Professor.

When comparing two objects, people either rely on internal memories of these objects or run their hands and eyes over them to directly perceive their similarity. The latter approach, a shortcut that offloads cognition to the active perceptual operations like eye or hand movements, requires a lower memory burden. In a study published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova and SFI Research Fellow Arseny Moskvichev demonstrate that it is also more effective.

SFI External Professor and Science Steering Committee member Michelle Girvan (University of Maryland) has been elected President of the Network Science Society, an organization that supports an interdisciplinary research community dedicated to investigating the phenomena, modeling, and behavior of networks.

In The Power of the Invisible: The Quantessence of Reality, former SFI External Professor Sander Bais offers a three-volume set that reviews classical physics, dives deeper into quantum mechanics, and explores the underpinnings of complex systems, all in a coffee-table-worthy package. "This remarkable tour de force covers all of physics and much of science in general with elan, insight, and humor, imparting a feeling of awe for the profundity of the laws of the universe," writes SFI External Professor Doyne Farmer. "It encapsulates the wisdom that can only be achieved by a brilliant physicist at the end of a long career, and is a tribute to the mystique and magic of science." 

SFI External Professor Mason A. Porter (UCLA) has received the 2025 George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for “his outstanding exposition of the mathematical sciences to audiences at all levels and interests.”

A new paper in PNAS shows that the idea of “taking turns” could help resolve the 1960s paradox of the plankton — and better predict how climate change will remake our oceans.

Since the last major ice age, populations of large animals have dwindled. These declines have directly affected climate change, wildfires, and natural resources. A March 17-19 working group brings together historical ecologists, conservation biologists, computational modelers, and archaeogeneticists to explore these impacts further and develop new tools for predicting ecosystem resilience and preventing future megafauna loss.

Using a variety of analogy puzzles, SFI researchers have shown that the reasoning abilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model fall short when faced with small changes. Recognizing the limitations of these tools is critical to knowing when and to what extent they can be trusted.

In a recent study in Physical Review Letters, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Aanjaneya Kumar and colleagues show that the margin of victory for any election can be predicted solely by the voter turnout.

Applications for the third Complexity Global School (CGS) are now open. The school will be hosted at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and applicants from all countries are eligible to apply. Supported by the Omidyar Network and the Ford Foundation, the school is free, with expenses covered, for all admitted students. Applications are due by March 16, 2025.

Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with others, or anti-conformity, the choice to deliberately diverge. A new way to model this dynamic interplay could ultimately help explain societal phenomena like political polarization, cultural trends, and the spread of misinformation. 

Over the past three years, SFI has hosted an annual Complexity-GAINs school — two-week-long programs organized around a theme for Ph.D. students — in different locations in Europe. The third and final school, focused on ecological resilience and persistence, was held last October in Sète, France.

Half a century ago, economic research took a little-noticed yet dramatic departure from the study of concepts most people might be familiar with from Econ 101. The field shifted from an almost exclusive focus on market transactions and government policies to include societal interactions for which supply-and-demand models don’t work. A new paper in Economics Letters uses a machine-learning technique to document this shift away from state-related topics toward a focus the authors term "civil society."

Knowing only the building blocks of our own biosphere, can we predict how life may exist on other planets? What factors will rein in the Frankensteinian life forms we hope to build in laboratories here on Earth? A paper in Interface Focus co-authored by several SFI researchers takes these questions out of the realm of science fiction and into scientific laws.

On December 19, the SFI Press published Volume 4 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science. Following the publication of Volumes 1 and 2 in May and Volume 3 in September, this concluding book contains papers published between 1989 and 2000 — an era when complex-systems science had become a fledgling field of study in its own right. Hardcover and paperback versions of each book are available globally at cost.

Multi-scale complex systems are ubiquitous and also notoriously difficult to model. In disturbed systems, conventional bottom-up or top-down approaches can’t capture the interactions between the small-scale behaviors and the system-level properties. SFI External Professor John Harte and his collaborators have worked to resolve this challenge by building a hybrid method that links bottom-up behaviors and top-down causation in a single theory.