News + Events

Do urban scaling relationships apply to the old cities of Europe, with their unique development patterns and multiple cycles of boom and bust, or are they an aberration on the urban landscape?

Psychologists and anthropologists convene at SFI this week to try to figure out what to do about what’s called the WEIRD problem (social science studies of subjects with Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic backgrounds).

Media artists, composers, and artist-programmers join SFI scientists this week to discuss new ways to represent complex data.

This week at SFI a working group investigates an organizing principle at the heart of ecology.

Understanding groupings, or “modules,” is a key problem in network theory.

Drawing on the richness of data and questions that arose out of agent-based simulations of the Artificial Anasazi Project that originated at SFI in the mid 1990s, SFI External Professor George Gumerman and Alan Swedlund (UMass Amherst) have taken their simulation one step further in a revised model they call the Artificial Long House Valley model.

This week's working group at SFI brings together ecologists and computer scientists to develop techniques for analyzing an explosion of food web data.

SFI's Luis Bettencourt contributed to a newly-released report that could inform policies to promote innovation in urban centers.

Young male bluebirds may gain an evolutionary advantage by delaying breeding and helping out their parents' nests instead, according to new research led by SFI's Caitlin Stern.

New research in Nature Scientific Reports explores the impact of hunter-gatherers on north Pacific marine food webs and the behaviors that helped preserve their network of food sources.

A model developed by a team of SFI-affiliated researchers predicts the scale and variability of hunter-gatherer migrations based on human body size, available food resources (energy), and other factors.

Cities may have unique economic profiles, but as urban areas grow, they exhibit common trends.

SFI's Aaron Clauset and Daniel Larremore explore the complex contributors to the gender imbalance that persists in university computer science departments. 

Using aerial drones to track the movements and interactions of a migrating herd of caribou, SFI Omidyar Fellow Andrew Berdahl plans to test a hypothesis that traveling en masse helps the herd navigate.

By measuring how closely words’ meanings are related within and between languages, a research team has revealed that for many universal concepts, the world’s languages feature a common structure of semantic relatedness.

Our historic vulnerability to climate change can inform the way we manage climate-induced disasters, according to newly-published research conceived in a series of SFI working groups.

Articles in CityLab and MIT Technology Review highlight new SFI research on metropolitan buildings, population size, innovation, and a city’s carbon footprint.

A team from the Santa Fe Institute, Arizona State University, and Slum Dwellers International has been selected to find new ways to help the world's poorest, most vulnerable communities.

A new paper by SFI External Professor Juan Pérez-Mercader and colleague Matthew Egbert addresses the puzzle of how organisms regulate and respond to their own adaptations.

Environmental triggers may have tipped the transition from single- to multi-cellular life, according to new research by SFI REU Emma Wolinsky and Omidyar Fellow Eric Libby.