News + Events

SFI is hosting the 10th JSMF–SFI Postdocs in Complexity Conference from March 29–31. The biannual event provides a forum for postdoctoral fellows studying complex systems to share research ideas, develop new career skills, and expand their professional networks.

A March 15-17 working group brought a complex-systems lens to study the paradox of why human societies have increased in intricacy despite the second law of thermodynamics's wisdom that entropy increases over time. 

SFI Sabbatical Visitor Carlos Gershenson, a research professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, spends his sabbatical at SFI to finish work on his book Balance.

The specter of information is haunting the sciences. With these words, Wojciech H. Zurek invited fellow scientists to attend the 1989 Santa Fe Institute workshop on which the proceedings volume Complexity, Entropy & the Physics of Information was based. In a two-volume reprint, the SFI Press offers an affordable and accessible update to the original text, with a new preface from attendee Seth Lloyd that contextualizes the significance of this record of a meeting that marked the intersection of information, physics, complexity, and computation.

A February 22–24, 2023 working group explores the relationship between regeneration, robustness, and failure.

In the last 50 years, economic theory has come to be based almost solely on mathematics. This brings logical precision, but according to a new paper by SFI economist Brian Arthur, it restricts what economics can easily talk about.

Does a diversity of species protect ecological communities from invasion? Recent work by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner takes up this long-standing question for complexity science, at a microscopic scale.

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

SFI External Professor Wendy Carlin (University College London) has received the inaugural RES Medal for Services to the Economics Profession from the Royal Economic Society. 

SFI External Professors Amos Golan, Matthew Jackson, and Doug Eriwn have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for 2022, the association announced on January 31, 2023.

In December 2022, SFI opened applications for its Postdoctoral Fellows to apply for funding through the Lou Schuyler Internal Postdoctoral Research Grant Fund. Now in its second round, the fund offers SFI Postdoctoral Fellows up to $15,000 per grant to explore new areas of research or expand the scope of their current projects. 

Herb Gintis, who drew on a variety of disciplines to study human society, passed away on January 5, 2023, in Northampton, Massachusetts, at the age of 82. He had been an SFI External Professor since 2001 and was a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught since 1974.

Science-fiction author Ted Chiang — author of 12 short stories, two novellas, and recipient of 27 major writing awards — joins SFI's Miller Scholars. 

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

Collective Intelligence, a new online open-source journal, launched its inaugural issue this past fall. The editors hope the journal will help stimulate the discovery of the fundamental principles that underlie collective intelligence

Simulations that help determine how a large-scale pandemic will spread can take weeks or even months to run. A recent study in PLOS Computational Biology offers a new approach to epidemic modeling that could drastically speed up the process.

In her latest column for Quanta Magazine, SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell considers the implications of a machine learning technique called “Inverse Reinforcement Learning.”

SFI will host a three-day Collective Intelligence Symposium & Short Course on June 20–23, 2023, focusing on foundational ideas like first principles to help establish a rigorous approach to the study of collective intelligence. The event will also leap into unexplored possibilities through a Radical Ideas competition. Applications are required for all participants, and the priority deadline is February 1, 2023.

If we could rewind the tape of the Earth’s deep history back to the beginning and start the world anew — would social behavior arise yet again? In “Ex Machina,” John H. Miller introduces a methodology for exploring systems of adaptive, interacting, choice-making agents. Miller combines ideas from biology, computation, game theory, and the social sciences to simulate the evolution of social behavior.

Kyle Harper, a Roman Historian at the University of Oklahoma, uses the natural sciences to reshape his field. Harper joined SFI as a member of the Fractal Faculty in the fall of 2022.