A Message from SFI Vice President for Science
SFI is in the full swing of summer activities. We are awash in early-career researchers who have come to Santa Fe for our long-standing, long-form educational opportunities, the Undergraduate Complexity Research (UCR) Program, the Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS), and the Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science (GWCSS). These programs also bring many of our external professors to SFI each summer to both teach and visit (thank you!).
In addition to the incoming postdoctoral fellows I mentioned last Matrix (Max Jerdee, Maike Morrison, Shuhao Fu, Jordan Scharnhorst), Jacob Calvert accepted a part-time position as a Visiting Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow – his information is now on the website as well. Many of our current fellows recently led a retreat that has fostered new collaborations. There are also two upcoming postdoc conferences in Q3. From July 28 through August 8, the Complexity Global School (CGS) will convene for the second time in Bogotá, Colombia, in collaboration with the EPE Network Partner Center at the Universidad de Los Andes. This is funded in part by SFI’s Emergent Political Economies Program via a grant from the Omidyar Network. On September 16-19, our annual Postdocs in Complexity Conference will be held in the new Gurley Forum on the Miller campus, bringing together SFI postdocs, other complexity postdocs from the U.S., and international postdocs identified through CGS and EPE. The theme is “A Postdoc Tapestry, Weaving Global Collaboration”, and it is funded by a James S. McDonnell Foundation grant and the EPE/Omidyar Network grant.
We have a variety of regular working groups and micro working groups from July through September. I mention a few here. A complete list is at the end of the Matrix and online. External Professor D. Eric Smith and colleagues are hosting a working group August 18-21 on “Assembly Theory for Folded Matter.” Concurrently, August 19-20, David Freidel and colleagues are hosting a working group on “Collaborative Visions of Power in Mesoamerica: Teotihuacan and the Lowland Maya.” Thanks to SFI Trustee Jerry Murdock for funding both meetings! Earlier in the month, August 12-13, Karen Willcox (External Professor) and Yuanzhao Zhang (Complexity Pdoc Fellow) are hosting a working group on "Dynamical Systems and Graph Theory Approaches for Digital Twins,” a follow-up to a workshop last fall (both funded by an NSF grant to Willcox). In September, External Professor Dan Rockmore and colleagues host a working group on “The New New Science" (Sept 15-18). On September 22-24, Resident Professors Cris Moore and Melanie Mitchell host a working group on “AI in the Criminal Justice System.”
In addition to regular meetings, a long-form working group on “Economic Agent-Based Models: Crossing Over the Tipping Point” will be held in the Gurley Forum during the entire month of August. Organized by Doyne Farmer, who is also our featured external professor in this quarter’s Matrix, the meeting is funded by the Zegar Family Foundation and the Omidyar Network via the EPE program. The meeting brings together two dozen experts for two- to four-week residencies to focus on pushing economic ABMs from the margins to the center of economic research, application, and policy. An ambitious and important goal