News + Events

SFI Fractal Faculty Carlo Rovelli has been awarded the 2024 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. The award, named after its first recipient Lewis Thomas, a writer, educator, and physician–scientist, honors and recognizes those who have been able to use their vision and voice to explain science in multiple dimensions.

Cities are defined by various criteria, from political units to built areas identified in satellite images to how people move across geographical space. The proliferation of cell phones around the globe may offer a more complete picture of people's mobility. 

A recent report co-authored by SFI External Professor Ross Hammond outlines six main strategies for incorporating complex-systems science into the USDA’s nutritional guideline and offers a roadmap for creating a more nuanced, multifaceted approach to shaping nutritional policies.

An April 2–3 workshop met to discuss methods for quantifying the potential value of specific datasets.

A textbook co-edited by SFI External Professor Allison Stanger (Middlebury College) explores the implications of allowing algorithms to make decisions for us and the best practices for integrating algorithms into our lives. 

Carlo Rovelli, a physicist known for his work on loop quantum gravity and for several popular science books including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time, has joined SFI's Fractal Faculty.

In his new book Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution, SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino provides an excellent introduction to agent-based modeling for social scientists and others interested in modeling cognitive–social systems and integrates the use of computational agent-based models with classic mathematical approaches from dynamical systems and game theory.

As AI increasingly influences our human experience, we need to better understand its behavior. In new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, SFI External Professor Matthew Jackson and co-authors presented two recent versions of ChatGPT — GPT-3 and -4 — with a common personality test and a suite of behavioral games, then compared the responses to those of humans from around the world. 

There are many things we don’t know about how history unfolds. The process might be impersonal, even inevitable, as some social scientists have suggested; human societies might be doomed to decline. Or, individual actions and environmental conditions might influence our communities’ trajectories. Social scientists have struggled to find a consensus on such fundamental issues. A new framework by SFI faculty and others suggests a way to unify these perspectives.

Randomness in an environment can make predictions difficult to model, but a new approach helps streamline the process.

A March 11–15 working group will focus on the possibility of embodied agents gaining an awareness of what it is like to be.

Networks can represent changing systems, like the spread of an epidemic or the growth of groups in a population of people. But the structure of these networks can change, too, as links appear or vanish over time. In a new paper, a trio of SFI-affiliated researchers describe a novel way to aggregate static snapshots into smaller clusters of networks while still preserving the dynamic nature of the system.

In December last year, the first Complexity Global School (CGS) brought together students from South Asia and Africa together to explore ideas at the intersection of complexity science and political economy. The School, which is part of SFI’s Emerging Political Economies program, was hosted by partnering institutions Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. 

In the first major gifts of 2024, and as part of SFI’s 40th Anniversary, the McKinnon Family Foundation and the Darla Moore Foundation have collectively pledged $750K each year for the next five years to support SFI’s education and early-career researcher programs. The gifts will ensure the financial stability of SFI’s Omidyar Fellowship, summer Undergraduate Complexity Research program, and its flagship Complex Systems Summer School. 

New simulation model shows that the evolution of sustainable institutions critically depends on clearly defined and enforced access rights.

Applications for the second Complexity Global School, to be hosted at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, from July 21 to August 3 – are now open.

In a new paper, SFI External Professor Ricard Solé and co-authors propose an experimental setup that will test James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis's hypothesis of planetary self-regulation.

SFI Professor Samuel Bowles was recently recognized as a Fellow of the International Economics Association in recognition of "excellence in economic research, research-driven popular writing, and economic policymaking.” 

In 2015, the United Nations published its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, setting aspirational and interconnected targets for economic, environmental, and health well-being, but we're falling woefully short of those targets. Of particular concern to a pair of SFI External Professors are the biodiversity goals. In a February working group, researchers will explore the probabilities and consequences of falling short of the U.N. goals. 

A new study in Nature Communications presents data and a mathematical model to explain why there is more unconscious, or implicit, racial bias in some cities than others. The study, which brings together the math of cities with the psychology of how individuals develop unconscious racial biases, suggests that a city's level of implicit bias depends on how populous, diverse, and segregated that city is.