The latest news and events at the Santa Fe Institute
SFI's free online course, Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos with College of the Atlantic professor David Feldman, begins Oct. 1. Topics to be covered include: phase space, bifurcations, chaos, the butterfly effect, strange attractors, and pattern formation.
Enrollment is now open for SFI’s flagship online course, Introduction to Complexity. The course will begin on October 1.
A new paper exploring social perception biases finds that the greatest perception biases emerge when majority and minority groups are disproportionate in size, and when nodes of the same group are highly connected to each other.
Tuesday, August 27, evolutionary biologist and journalist Olivia P. Judson discussed the patterns of life throughout Earth's history.
A new Entropy paper analyzes games with players who were subject to error, or who were “boundedly rational.”
Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for takeoff: InterPlanetary Transmissions: Genesis has hit the shelves.
A new paper in Animal Behaviour lays out three concepts from complex systems science that could advance studies into animal social complexity.
An incoming editorial team for a flagship political science journal aims to confront race and gender. They met at the Santa Fe Institute July 17-19, 2019 for a brainstorming retreat.
The July issue of Knowable Magazine published an interview with Jeremy Sabloff, External Professor Emeritus of SFI and past President of the Institute (2009-2015), about his work on “the archaeology of common folk,” which is reviewed in the 2019 Annual Review of Anthropology.
Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, creator of SFI’s online education platform, was named co-chair of SFI’s Science Board at its 2019 spring meeting.
SFI Science Board member Derek Smith has worked in academia, industry, and public health. He is using insights from his work at SFI to develop an evolution-inspired flu vaccine.
SFI External Professor Raissa D’Souza (UC Davis) has joined the journal Physical Review Research as Lead Editor.
The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines, edited by David Wolpert, Chris Kempes, Peter Stadler, and Joshua Grochow, lays out recent advances that are driving a new “thermodynamics of computation.”
External Professor Stephanie Forrest and co-authors received the 2019 Ten-Year Most Influential Paper award from the International Conference on Software Engineering for their 2009 paper "Automatically Finding Patches Using Genetic Programming."
Former SFI Postdoc Jeremy Van Cleve, now an assistant professor of biology at the University of Kentucky, has received a CAREER award for early career faculty from the National Science Foundation.
Tuesday, July 9, computer scientist Sabine Hauert discussed how individual actions give rise to swarm behaviors, and the challenges researchers face when engineering swarms for desired applications.
Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier, events occurring with higher-than-expected probability. Using the same mathematical tools that describe stock market crashes, SFI researchers explain the evolutionary dynamics behind this universal pattern in the fossil record and uncover "a new normal."
In their essay for Aeon, External Professor Sara Walker and Professor Michael Lachmann argue that we would do well to understand life as a process of transmitting information.
In his new book Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity, SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner compares the tools of biological evolution with those of human innovation to make sense of the creative process that is happening in our minds all the time.