News + Events

One of the first-movers in game theory, SFI External Professor Martin Shubik died August 22, 2018. He was 92 years old.

The Maya Working Group meets at SFI to discuss a new theme, “Being Maya,” which will focus on the cultural identity of the lowland Maya civilization.

The bane of the language-learner is a goldmine for linguists, cultural evolutionists, and computer scientists, a group of whom will meet at SFI Aug. 27–28, 2018. Given the messy state of linguistic affairs, they ask, is it possible to quantitatively encode “meaning” independent of any particular language?

It may seem that there isn't much cross-discussion between theoretical and empirical scientists, but a new cross-citation network analysis shows there is more overlap than many believe. 

An SFI Working Group examines the evidence of low-density Maya settlements and the challenge this poses to the idea that density increases with population.

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.

In this SFI Community Lecture, science writer Sabine Hossenfelder explains 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. Watch her talk.

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, 2018, 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. 

New books by SFI Authors, highlighted in the Summer 2018 Parallax, inclue Ten Thousand Years of Inequality, and The Emergence of Premodern States.

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.