News + Events

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.

In November, Brian Enquist, Mary O’Connor, and Chris Kempes organized a workshop to take stock of advances in biological scaling theory since the publication of a seminal book for the field.

For at least 200,000 years, humans have been trying to understand their environments and adapt to them. At times, we have succeeded; often, we have not. In a new study, SFI's Stefani Crabtree, Jennifer Dunne, and others analyze how information flows from ecosystems to the societies inhabiting them.

Two recent papers by CU Boulder and SFI co-authors explore the socioeconomic makeup and the educational backgrounds of tenure-track faculty across the U.S. 

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.

Charles Stevens, a preeminent neurobiologist who revealed fundamental architectures in the brain and whose experimental techniques paved the way for decades of molecular neuroscience, passed away on October 21, 2022, in San Diego, CA. At the time of his passing Stevens, 88, was a distinguished professor emeritus at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a fellow of the Santa Fe Institute’s Science Board and External Faculty.

A new dataset, WikiArtVectors, aims to make computational data approaches available to art historians and cultural analysts, to help discover and understand patterns of cultural evolution.

In anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s newest books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” (Knopf, 2022), former SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales recollects McCarthy’s long and ongoing friendship with SFI.

If you think clean energy is expensive, try fossil fuels. A new report in the journal Joule shows that a rapid transition to renewable energy sources by 2050 could save the global economy trillions of dollars compared to both a gradual transition and to no transition at all.

Friendships in childhood influence incomes in adulthood, and may play an important role in stimulating economic mobility, according to research published across two new papers in Nature.

In a new study, published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, SFI's Simon DeDeo and Helena Miton describe a new model for understanding the transmission of tacit knowledge – that kind of working knowledge that is passed down with very limited specification. 

SFI External Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers will lead a new interdisciplinary Center for Pandemic Decision Science at the University of Texas at Austin, funded by a pilot grant from the National Science Foundation.