News + Events

The grid is in crisis, facing coinciding pressures of electrification, decarbonization, enormous demand from data centers, and grid technology updates such as digitalization and artificial intelligence. A working group, "Converging Technologies, Diverging Institutions: Bridging Governance for the Grid and the Grid’s Edge," met at SFI February 19 – 25 to address these overarching challenges.

A December 10–12 working group met to bring together researchers from two fields — neuromorphic computing and stochastic thermodynamics — to think about ways our built computers might replicate the energy efficiency of biological brains. 

For most of human history, large societies have drawn clear lines between people who belong to the in-group and those who do not. These lines determine who is recognized, protected, or granted status, and who is excluded. But starting during the Enlightenment period, European societies and their offshoots began relaxing the rules around who was granted fundamental rights and protections, a development many scholars see as essentially unique in human history — one that has grown steadily over the past several centuries and continues today. 

Music is a universal language across time, peoples, and geographies, and also fundamental to our human experience, a result of our biological evolution. Despite musicality’s connection to both culture and biology, studies on the evolution of music have rarely brought these topics together. A May 28-30 working group is convening to begin bridging that gap.

All organisms carry their parents in their DNA. But it’s become clear that offspring inherit information from many other places, too. Mammals inherit gut microbiomes while in utero, and antibodies through breast milk. Birds, reptiles, and fish inherit environmental information about the particular place they hatch. An SFI working group explores what other forms of non-genetic information show up in biology, why they aren't as salient as genetics, and what can they teach about the way living things cope with uncertain environments.

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. 

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.

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.

It’s become easier than ever before to engage with content online, particularly with features like infinite scrolling. However, the smooth user experience of social media apps encourages superficial engagement. In turn, this has contributed to the spread of fake news, misinformation, and hate speech. A September 11–13 working group discusses the impacts of introducing friction in social media to help tackle these problems.

On August 19–23, SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell and SFI External Professor John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins University) led a working group on “The Nature of Intelligence.” It was the first in a series of six meetings to be held over the next three years. Scholars from diverse fields — neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and AI — were invited to investigate the broad notion of intelligence, whether in machines or biological systems. 

In this “Ocean Decade,” as declared by the United Nations, we face an unprecedented wealth of data documenting the world's oceans. Gathered with tools from satellites to autonomous robots, what once was an information paucity now has become a glut. An August 12–14 working group gathers an international cohort of BioGeoSCAPES Fellows to propose top priorities for the next era of highly interdisciplinary ocean science. 

An SFI working group met July 22–24 to consider the role of contingency in complex adaptive systems beyond biology.

A a June 10–14 workshop meets to develop a new poll for the Database of Religious History to help researchers interested in quantifying the role of music and ritual in religious practices around the world. 

A December 11–15 working group focuses on how the interaction of information and energy, through computing, shapes social systems. The meeting follows a March 2023 working group that laid the groundwork for this emerging area.

A September 27–29 workshop, the Complex Time General Conference on Immortality, meets to explore general patterns for lifespan across scales, from organisms, the mind, and behavior, to civilizations and star systems. The organizers hope to challenge preconceptions about immortality and, eventually, develop a general theory of longevity. 

The past 20 years have seen rapid changes in our social networks, and our individual behaviors are now maladapted. To respond to these changes as a society, we first need a better understanding of how groups alter their decision-making strategies and beliefs to cope with emerging problems. A September 12–14 workshop, part of SFI’s CounterBalance Series and funded by Siegel Family Foundation, is convening scientists from a range of biological, social, and physical sciences, and senior representatives from civic organizations and the tech industry, to discuss the challenges and potential directions forward. 

From the perch of modernity, it is tempting to envision the limbs of the tree of life as inevitable, a steady march toward existence from one generation to the next. Some branches in the tree are shorter than others, of course — tales of extinction, from the asteroid-blasted dinosaurs to the human-blasted passenger pigeon, offer a tragic alternative vision of what life on Earth could look like today.  An August working group, “Feasible but Undiscovered Metabolisms II: Thermodynamics, Evolution, and the Origin of Life,” explores spaces of undiscovered life.

By using knowledge of phase transitions in physical systems, researchers can gain new insights into more efficient ways to answer questions about patterns and structures in sprawling datasets. SFI Professor Cris Moore recently organized a working group, held July 17–21 at SFI, that brought together experts from computer science, physics, and mathematics to explore connections between theoretical computer science and spin-glass theory, which is a framework for understanding phase transitions in complex materials. 

Prediction is a key part of complex systems, in a wide variety of fields. Physicists and mathematicians use prediction performance to evaluate their models of mechanical systems; engineering prediction algorithms can inform the design of complicated devices. Prediction is also integral in artificial intelligence, in large language models like ChatGPT, which are designed to predict a word or words that follow from a prompt. A July 10–14 workshop at SFI called “Sensory Prediction: Engineered and Evolved” met to discuss how to build better models of prediction in living organisms.