News + Events

SFI External Professor Mark Newman has updated his classic textbook on networks. Oxford University Press publishes Networks, second edition, in early September, 2018.

The notion that an attractive person is “out of your league” doesn’t often dissuade dating hopefuls – at least online. In fact, the majority of online daters seek out partners who are more desirable than themselves, suggests a new large-scale analysis published in Science Advances.

The Santa Fe Institute is looking for creative thinkers for the Omidyar and ASU-SFI Postdoctoral Fellowships. Apply before October 28.

In this SFI Community Lecture, science writer Sabine Hossenfelder will explain what physicists mean when they say a theory is beautiful, what went wrong with their reliance on it, and how the field can move on.

SFI External Professor Steen Rasmussen was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2018 ALIFE conference in Tokyo, Japan.

SFI welcomes ten new professors to our external faculty, a cohort of academics who enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex systems science, and connect us to over 70 institutions around the globe.

A small cadre of scientists and entrepreneurs convened a two-week long SFI working group to address the growing gap between our physical and social technologies.

July 26-28, an interdisciplinary group of researchers gathers at SFI to explore the relationship between aging and infectious disease.

Neuroscientists and complexity scientists meet to develop new tools for studying the brain as a complex network. Their working group, titled “Cognitive Regime Shift: When the Brain Breaks,” is part of SFI’s Aging, Adaptation, and the Arrow of Time research theme, funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

In a paper published in Science Advances, researchers from the Santa Fe Institute describe a new algorithm called SpringRank that uses wins and losses to quickly find rankings lurking in large networks. When tested on a wide range of synthetic and real-world datasets, ranging from teams in an NCAA college basketball tournament to the social behavior of animals, SpringRank outperformed other ranking algorithms in predicting outcomes and in efficiency.

On July 17 at The Lensic Performing Arts Center, economists Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin discussed the social consequences of a failed economic model, then outlined a new economic paradigm as the basis for a more sustainable and just global future. Watch the lecture.

Polygyny has been more common among relatively egalitarian low-tech horticulturalists than in highly unequal, capital-intensive agricultural societies. This surprising fact is known as the "polygyny paradox," and a new study from SFI's Dynamics of Wealth Inequality Project provides a possible resolution of the puzzle.

SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Hajime Shimao and Junpei Komiyama present an algorithm that imposes a fairness constraint on machine learning to prevent bias.

SFI hosts a working group July 10-13, 2018 to discuss climate projections for the next 50 years and what those projections may mean for the future human niche. 

This question of how the collective influences individual performance is central to the work of SFI’s investigation into the limits of human performance. In a workshop that takes place June 25-27, experts from a range of disciplines, including physiology, organizational behavior, sports analytics and applied mathematics, explore how the collective affects the individual.

Recent breakthroughs in nonequilibrium statistical physics have revealed opportunities to advance the "thermodynamics of computation," a field that could have far-reaching consequences for how we understand, and engineer, our computers.

The latest scientific understanding of time, and how time shapes our experience, were subjects of a June 19 panel discussion between physicist James Hartle, cosmologist Sean Carroll, evolutionary theorist David Krakauer, and science writer Jenniffer Ouellette. Watch the panel discussion.

SFI Professor David Wolpert has been included in a NASA Group Achievement Award for his work on the Machine Learning and Data Sciences Team.

Agent-based modeling has been used to study everything from economics to biology to political science to business and management. This July, programmers and non-programmers alike can learn to model by enrolling in Introduction to Agent-based Modeling, Complexity Explorer’s massive open online course (MOOC).

An SFI workshop brings together thinkers in disciplines ranging from cosmology to chronobiology to neuroscience to explore how different timescales emerge.