Santa Fe Institute

SFI’s REU program provides an opportunity for young scientists from many disciplines to explore what a social science perspective brings to other fields and how traditionally quantitative disciplines can contribute to the social sciences. Each REU participant works with one or more SFI faculty mentors on a specific, mutually selected projects focusing on the computational properties of complex systems with particular, but not exclusive, emphasis on the social sciences.

The Complex Systems Summer School offers an intensive four week introduction to complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the sciences and social sciences. The school is for participants who seek background and hands-on experience to help them prepare to conduct interdisciplinary research in areas related to complex systems.

The program consists of an intensive series of lectures, laboratories, and discussion sessions focusing on foundational ideas, tools, and current topics in complex systems research. These include nonlinear dynamics and pattern formation, scaling theory, information theory and computation theory, adaptation and evolution, network structure and dynamics, adaptive computation techniques, computer modeling tools and specific applications of these core topics to various disciplines. In addition, participants will formulate and carry out team projects related to topics covered in the program.

Joe Traub (Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University; External Professor, Santa Fe Institute)

Elhanan Borenstein (University of Washington; SFI External Professor)

The Santa Fe Institute is pleased to announce the 18th annual Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science Modeling and Complexity. The workshop will bring together a group of advanced graduate students and a small faculty for an intensive two week study of computational social science modeling and complexity. The workshop will consist of lectures by faculty, special topic seminars by members of the Santa Fe Institute, and presentations of work in progress by graduate student participants. The primary goal of the summer workshop is to assist graduate students pursuing research agendas which includes a computational modeling component. A significant portion of the workshop will be devoted to analyzing and improving research being conducted by the graduate student participants.

Helmut Katzgraber (Department of Physics & Astronomy, Texas A&M University)

Dan Hruschka, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Arizona State University; author Friendship:  Development, Ecology and Evolution of a Relationship, SFI Omidyar Fellow Alumnus.

Sponsored in memory of Kate Klein, from the Kate Klein Fund at the Santa Fe Community Foundation

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Jeremy Van Cleve and Laura Fortunato

Didier Sornette (ETH Zurich)

Luis Bettencourt (Santa Fe Institute) and Jose Lobo (Arizona State University)

Arthur D. Lander (Center for Complex Biological Systems, and Departments of Developmental & Cell Biology and Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine; SFI Science Board)

Charles Efferson (University of Zurich)

Sylvie Thoron (Paris XII)

Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University)

Joe Halpern (Cornell University) and Willemien Kets (Northwestern)

Rajiv Sethi (Columbia University)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Jeremy Van Cleve and Laura Fortunato

Marc Lipsitch (Director, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard University; SFI External Professor)

Alan Kirman (Université d'Aix Marseille lll)

Marie LaLanne and Paul Seabright (Toulouse University)

Rob J. De Boer (Theoretical Biology & Bioinformatics, Utrecht University; SFI External Professor)

Duncan Watts, Principal Researcher, Microsoft; author, Everything Is Obvious Once You Know The Answer; and former SFI External Professor.

Sponsored by the Peters Family Foundation

Louis Theran (Freie Universität Berlin)

Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith (Director of Energy Research, Oxford University; President SESAME Council; Director General, CERN 1994-1998)

Kyle Pate, Southern Oregon University

Panelists include Lord Colin Renfrew, Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, Nobel laureate Professor Murray Gell-Mann, Professor Melanie Mitchell, and Professor David Krakauer (moderator)

This event is generously supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Madeleine Daepp, Washington University in St. Louis

SFI / NMC Program on Combining Information Theory and Game Theory

Organizers: David Wolpert (SFI External Faculty), Simon DeDeo (SFI Omidyar Fellow), Nils Bertschinger (Max Planck), Eckehard Olbrich (Max Planck), Eric Smith (SFI External Faculty), Luis Bettencourt (SFI)

How a single agent (human, firm, animal, etc.) behaves typically depends on what information it has about its environment, and on its preferences. Accordingly, the joint behavior of multiple interacting agents can depend strongly on the information available to the separate agents, both about one another, and about external random variables. Precisely how the joint behavior depends on the information available to the agents is determined by the preferences of those agents. So in general there is a strong interplay among the preferences of all the agents, their behavior, and the information structure connecting them.

One tool that might help us understand this interplay is Shannon information theory. In Shannon information theory, information is a function of a distribution. Increasing the amount of information in a distribution means making that distribution more tightly concentrated. This definition applies not only if the support of the distribution shrinks or expands, but also if it moves.

Another tool that might help us understand the interplay is game theory. In contrast to Shannon information theory, game theory does not quantify information in terms of properties of probability distributions. Rather the information available to a player is quantified as an "information set," specifying a set of states the world might be in. The amount of information available to a player increases if such an information set shrinks. In contrast to the case with Shannon information theory, the change in information for moving an information set is undefined.

There are other differences between information theory and game theory. For example, whereas the foundations of Shannon information theory concern a single player (the designer of a communication network), the foundations of game theory concern multiple players.

Reconciling the different perspectives on information in Shannon information theory and game theory could have many benefits. Most directly, it may help us understand the interplay among the preferences of a set of interacting players, their behavior, and the information structure connecting them. As potential examples, it might help us address issues like the following:

1. How do information theoretic quantifications of the joint behavior of a set of interacting players (e.g., mutual information between actions of pairs of them) vary with changes to the preferences of those players?

2. Can relating the philosophical foundations of the two fields improve them? For example, as Shannon himself emphasized, Shannon information is purely "syntactic," quantifying the amount of information in a distribution purely by how concentrated it is. Can the utility functions of game theory—which depend not just on how concentrated a distribution is, but also on where it is concentrated—be used to define a "semantic" variant of Shannon information?

3. Can relating the mathematical formalisms of the two fields improve them? For example, are there analogs of the powerful theorems of information theory for game-theoretic quantities, e.g., game theoretic versions of results concerning rate distortion tradeoffs, the data processing inequality, etc.?

More generally, greater understanding of the relation between information theory and game theory may generate breakthroughs in many disciplines, including economics, political science, cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence.

Full web page here.

Dr. Mathew Burrows, Counselor and Director, Analysis and Production Staff, National Intelligence Council

Space for this event is limited.  Please RSVP to Chris Wood at ccwood@santafe.edu.

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Jeremy Van Cleve and Laura Fortunato

George Starostin (Center for Comparative Linguistics, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow)

Emanuel Derman (Columbia University)

George Dyson (Author and Historian of Technology)

Richard Colbaugh (Sandia National Laboratories)

Herbert Maschner (Anthropology Research Professor; Director, Idaho Museum of Natural History; Director, Center for Archaeology, Materials, and Applied Spectroscopy)

Stephan Mertens (Theoretical Physics, Otto-von-Guericke University; External Professor, Santa Fe Institute)

Scott Ortman, Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute; Lightfoot Fellow, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

Nicolas Perony (ETH Zurich,  Chair of Systems Design)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Jeremy Van Cleve and Laura Fortunato

This two-and-a-half day course is an intensive tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of effort that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. This course, sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute, is specifically designed for professionals, faculty, students and others who are curious to explore and apply this new transdisciplinary scientific approach. This course has no prerequisites and requires no specific math or science background.

More information about the course can be found on our wiki page.

Graham Sack (Columbia University)

Luciano Costa (Institute of Physics at Sao Carlos, University of Sao Paulo)

Martin Davis (Professor Emeritus, Courant-NYU; Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley)

The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) and the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) will kick off a lecture series, Chaos to Complexity: Artists & Scientists Share Insights Into the Creative Process

4:00 PM — Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (108 Cathedral Place, Santa Fe)

The series explores the creative process in art and science.

Robert May, Baron May of Oxford; Professor, Zoology, Oxford University and Imperial College; former president of Britain's Royal Society, and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government

Troy Day (Professor and Canada Research Chair (TII), Mathematical Biology, Queens University)

Aram Harrow (University of Washington)

Chen Hou (Department of Biological Sciences, Missouri University of Science and Technology)

Eric Friedman (International Computer Science Institute and Computer Science, UC Berkeley)

Chris Wood (Vice President, Administration and Director, Business Network, Santa Fe Institute)

Peter Loxley (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Jeremy Van Cleve and Laura Fortunato

Pierre Cartier (Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques)

André Martins (Complex System Modelling Program, School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, University of São Paulo)

Henry Wright (Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology and Museum of Anthropology; Science Board, External Professor, Santa Fe Institute)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Jeremy Van Cleve and Laura Fortunato

Nikhil Kaza (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Rob Wilson (Project Director, Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada; Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta)

Bret Beheim (University of New Mexico)

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, M.D. (Clinical Professor of Medicine, UCLA Division of Cardiology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA) and Kathryn Bowers (University of California, Los Angeles)

Charles Stanish (Professor, Department of Anthropology; Director, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA)

George Gumerman (School for Advanced Research and SFI, External Professor)

Peter N. Peregrine (Professor of Anthropology, Lawrence University and External Professor, Santa Fe Institute)

Aram Galstyan (University of Southern California)

Greg Ver Steeg (University of Southern California)

Murray Gell-Mann (Distinguished Fellow, Santa Fe Institute)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Jeremy Van Cleve and Laura Fortunato

Paul Falkowski (Depts. of Geological Sciences & Marine & Coastal Science, Institute of Marine & Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University)

Matthew O. Jackson (Department of Economics, Stanford University)

Cris Moore (Professor, Santa Fe Institute)

Eckehard Olbrich (Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences)

Daniel Dennett (Tufts University)

Martin Strobel (Department of Economics, Maastricht University)

James Hansen (Columbia University Earth Institute)

Veit Elser (Cornell University)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper

Leysia Palen (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Paula Sabloff (Professor, Santa Fe Institute)

Amos Golan (Department of Economics, American University)

Greer Garson Theater, 1600 St. Michaels Drive, Santa Fe (NOTE:  Change in Venue)

Palen is an associate professor of computer science and director of Project EPIC (Empowering the Public with Information during Crisis) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Pascal Van Hentenryck (NICTA)

Peter F. Stadler (University of Leipzig; SFI External Professor)

Kevin Knuth (University at Albany - SUNY)

Aaron Clauset (University of Colorado, Boulder; SFI External Professor)

Burton Voorhees (Athabasca University)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper

Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)

Eric Mjolsness (University of California, Irvine)

Michael Batty (Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University of College London)

Clare Yu (University of California, Irvine)

Sarah "Sally" Otto (Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper

New Perspectives in Evolution

Santa Fe, NM

This annual SFI Science Board meeting will focus on building a vision for future SFI research directions. The topic this year focuses on new quantitative, biological, and cultural perspectives on evolution.

Participation is by invitation only.

Alison Gopnik (University of California, Berkeley)

Mimi Koehl (University of California, Berkeley; SFI Science Board)

Simon DeDeo (Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute)

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley and author of several books on child learning, including The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosophical Baby.

Thomas M. (Zack) Powell (University of California, Berkeley)

Stefan Pickl (Universität der Bundewehr München; Munich, Germany) and Dr. Daniel A. Nussbaum (Naval Postgraduate School)

Norman Yoffee (Prof. emeritus, Depts of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology, University of Michigan)

An intensive business applications-oriented introduction to agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) based on Michael North and Charles Macal’s book Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (Oxford 2007). The first half of the course will focus on ABMS concepts from the perspective of company managers and analysts. The second half of the course will focus on ABMS implementation from the perspective of company software developers and will include extensive hands-on exercises. Participants are invited to attend the first session, the second session, or both depending on their interests. Business Network Members are invited to attend the course at a reduced rate.

Held on May 20-24, 2013 at Argonne, IL.  Co-organized by SFI Business Network and Argonne National Laboratory.

For more info and registration please visit the ABMS Course Page

Steve Lansing (University of Arizona; SFI External Professor)

Peter N. Peregrine (Lawrence University; SFI External Professor)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper

Jan Nijman (Director, Center for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam)

Tullis Onstott (Princeton University)

Christophe G. Lambert (Golden Helix Inc.)

"Innovation" is simultaneously: (a) one of the most over-used and increasingly meaningless buzz-words in the business lexicon; and (b) one of the most important but least understood human capabilities upon which business success depends. This informal event will explore innovation in all its breadth, from the perspective of innovation in evolutionary biology (which is perhaps the most compelling example of innovation in the universe) to the perspective of innovation in human-created technology (which is one form of innovation of significant interest in the corporate world).

Daniel Pauly (The University of British Columbia)

Catie Grasso (Oregon Health & Science University)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper

Piet Van Mieghem (Professor, Delft University of Technology; Chair, Network Architectures and Services (NAS))

Michael E. Smith (Arizona State University)

Groton, Massachusetts

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper

Marc Kirschner (Harvard University)

John Pepper (National Cancer Institute)

Albert Goldbeter (University of Brussels)

Lee Altenberg (Associate Editor, BioSystems)

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper

Post Doc Meeting, Organized by Evandro Ferrada and Paul Hooper