News + Events

Science writer Katherine Mast chatted with ASU-SFI Fellow Elizabeth Hobson about her upcoming experiments from a grant received by the Army Research Office to conduct social science research.

New research from an interdisciplinary collaboration among historians, political scientists, and statisticians suggests that rhetorical innovations may have played a significant role in winning acceptance for the new principles of governance that built the French republic’s foundation — and inspired future democracies around the world. 

A new study by External Professor Andreas Wagner and colleagues identifies the kind of gene regulation most likely to generate evolutionary change.

The Social Reactors working group meets April 5-6 to quantify the social processes that could govern both modern and ancient cities. 

A workshop at SFI in early April explores questions about scientific value. This event brings together researchers and institutional leaders who will discuss how to measure impact and improve judgment by looking at tools of complexity.

The noise in high-dimensional datasets can obscure real correlations — and give rise to illusory patterns that don’t mean anything. April 2-5, an interdisciplinary group of mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical computer scientists meets at SFI to address the problem and devise new algorithms that can succeed all the way up to the limits that arise from not having enough data, or not knowing if the data is accurate.  

A team of scientists has made a fundamental discovery about how fires on the edges of these forests control their shape and stability. Their study implies that when patches of tropical forest lose their natural shape it could contribute to the sudden, even catastrophic, transformation of that land from trees to grass.

Collective movement is one of the great natural wonders on Earth and has long captured our imaginations. But there’s a lot we don’t understand about how collective movement drives — and is driven by — broader ecological and evolutionary processes.

In a paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B, SFI Omidyar Fellow Andrew Berdahl, long-time collaborator Colin Torney (University of Glasgow), and co-authors, used drones to collect overhead footage of migrating caribou. This is the first paper to use drones to record the movement of individual animals within groups. It is also among the first to study social interactions within those groups as they migrate.

March 22-23, complex systems researchers will meet with business executives to discuss when and how diversity improves decision-making.

Patents are one of the best sources of data on technology development — an open-ended, historical and adaptive system that shows us how and why inventions have come to be. But is the U.S. patent system broken?

Most election polls take the political pulse of a state or nation by reaching out to citizens about their voting plans. SFI Professor Mirta Galesic says pollsters might also ask: how do your friends plan to vote?

A new analysis by External Professor Aaron Clauset asks us to re-think the current "long peace" in terms of historical trends of calm and conflict.

A working group brings scientists from diverse fields together to develop better quantitative models of optimal decision making.

A new paper by SFI External Professor Constantino Tsallis and Debarshee Bagchi shows which statistics are best applied to complex physical systems.

A themed issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B takes an interdisciplinary approach to address the mechanisms and impacts of human cultural evolution.

A new model for extinction brings body size and metabolic scaling into a landscape where ‘hungry’ or ‘full’ animals, great and small, interact and procreate.

This February, the Santa Fe Institute hosts an international workshop to explore a more integrative approach to thinking about evolutionary biology.

SFI External Professor Jon Machta and colleagues from the University of California, Davis, show that one of the most famous models in statistical physics, the Ising model, could be used to understand why pistachio trees bloom in synchrony.

A teacher, physicist, and all-around “high throughput” individual, SFI External Professor Alfred Hübler passed away Saturday, January 27, at the age of 60.