The latest news and events at the Santa Fe Institute
In the field of computer science, recent advances in machine learning have begun to produce tools that could be used to mine the vast trove of communiqués in cyberspace that hold patterns that can provide rich insights into how our minds work. An SFI working group, which met online in April, brought together psychologists and computer scientists to explore how the two fields can collaborate.
An online workshop, held March 31, explored what could happen after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, once social distancing guidelines are relaxed.
For students who participate in SFI’s Undergraduate Complexity Research program, the 10-week residential opportunity not only develops their research skills, it opens their minds to new concepts and builds lasting relationships. We recently caught up with two students who attended the 2019 session.
In his recent op-ed at The Hill, External Professor Rajiv Sethi explains that protecting life is essential to protecting livelihoods: the only sustainable way to protect economic livelihood is to ensure that re-entry into economic life is, and remains, non-life-threatening.
SFI Trustee Katherine Collins and ACtioN member Putnam Investments are co-hosting a Virtual Topical Meeting May 27-28 to explore how complexity science can inform sustainable investing. The meeting will bring investors together with leading climate and complexity scientists to discuss “The Complexity of Sustainability and Investing.”
On April 15, SFI hosted a flash discussion that focused on human behavior, incentives, and beliefs. The overarching message was that the financial and social fallout of the pandemic, while difficult to predict, will largely depend on actions at individual, community, and institutional levels.
SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji has been elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society (APS).
Areas of the planet home to one-third of humans will become as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara within 50 years, unless greenhouse gas emissions fall, according to research by an international research team of archaeologists, ecologists, and climate scientists. The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, resulted from a 2018 SFI working group on climate change and the human "niche." It finds that rapid heating would mean that 3.5 billion people would live outside the temperature and humidity combinations in which humans have thrived for 6,000 years.
SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Anjali Bhatt, who holds an AB in physics from Harvard University and is completing a PhD in organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and blends organizational and cultural theories, which are grounded in sociology, with the mathematical models of evolutionary biology and the quantitative tools of computational linguistics.
SFI welcomes Progam Postdoctoral Fellow Jonas Dalege, who holds a PhD in psychology as well as a BSc and MSc from the University of Amsterdam and will work with SFI Professor Mirta Galesic and External Professor Henrik Olsson to develop a unifying theoretical framework that integrates two approaches to understanding our ability to develop and maintain beliefs.
SFI welcomes Program Postdoctoral Fellow Natalie Grefenstette, who holds a PhD in prebiotic chemistry from University College London and is working with Professor Chris Kempes on a NASA-funded Agnostic Biosignatures project.
SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Mingzhen Lu, a biogeochemist who holds a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University and a BS in geosciences from Peking University.
SFI welcomes Eddie Lee, a Program Postdoctoral Fellow working with SFI President David Krakauer and Professor Jessica Flack in the Collective Computation (C4) Group, who builds on his background in physics to study social phenomena.
SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Andrés Ortiz-Muñoz, who holds a BS in mathematics and physics from the University of Texas at El Paso and is completing a PhD in biology at CalTech.
SFI welcomes Program Postdoctoral Fellow George Cantwell, who is completing his PhD in physics at the University of Michigan and recently tackled one well-known flaw in network modeling that has persisted since the 1930s, and who will be working with SFI Professor Cris Moore.
Research News Briefs highlight new studies from the SFI community published in the last quarter. The following briefs appeared in SFI's Spring 2020 Parallax newsletter.
The concept of the extended phenotype provides a way to circumvent Landauer’s bound.
Forecasting ambiguity is inevitable in exponential growth processes that underlie epidemics.
COVID-19 lockdowns provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study wildlife in empty cities.