News + Events

A working group meeting February 4-6 begins to develop a generalizable theory about the role of information in group conflict.

A working group meets to identify the mechanims that drive different species to make different social choices — band together or go it solo — during times of food shortage.

A working group meets to explore the complex dynamics between plants and animals, predators and prey, and how changes in those interactions can lead to irreversible transitions in ecological communities.

Danielle Bassett presented an SFI Community Lecture on networks and how we, as networks, use network science to think about ourselves at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on February 19.

A major new report takes a complex systems perspective on obesity, undernutrition, and climate change. The authors, including External Professor Ross Hammond, identify connected drivers for the three pandemics and make practical recommendations for both policy and bottom-up social change.

New SFI research challenges a popular conception of how machine learning algorithms “think” about certain tasks.

The AIP journal Chaos has announced that “Anatomy of leadership in collective behavior,” co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Joshua Garland, former Omidyar Fellow Andrew Berdahl, and their collaborators, is among the most-downloaded papers of 2018.

Jennifer Dunne, Stefani Crabtree, and colleagues present their ArcheoEcology work in two back-to-back symposia, “How Human Interactions with Biodiversity Shape Socio-Ecological Dynamics in Deep Time” on Sunday, Feb. 17 at 1:30 and 3:30 pm at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C.

One of the first studies to examine how climate is influencing "functional traits" in forest communities on a global scale finds evidence of major changes. 

Historian Andrea Wulf and philosopher John Kaag have been named Miller Scholars at the Santa Fe Institute for 2019.

New books by SFI Authors, highlighted in the Winter 2018-2019 Parallax, inclue Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems, The Model Thinker, Shadows of Doubt, Computational Matter, Viruses as Complex Adaptive Systems, and Pertussis.

A new paper published in the journal Entropy shows how tools from information theory, a branch of complexity science, can help decipher ice cores by quickly homing in on portions of the data that require further investigation. 

An SFI working group hopes to develop a model that can resolve some of the paradoxes of sexual selection.

A working group at the Santa Fe Institute recently convened to further ecological and evolutionary theory and craft an application for a National Science Foundation (NSF) “Rules of Life” grant.

An opinion piece in Trends in Ecology and Evolution introduces real-world complexity to social dilemmas by accounting for the way individuals modify and adapt to the environments that surround them.

An SFI Working Group meets to explore the big picture on viruses, from infections of single cells to epidemics among populations.

An SFI workshop explores the evolutionary consequences of developmental bias — the tendency of organisms to evolve some phenotypes more readily than others.

The Dynamic Multi-System Resilience in Human Aging working group meets in November to discuss new data on the aging process, and how to understand the physiological and psychological systems that lead to resilience in elderly people.

Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President Geoffrey West has been awarded the 2018 Los Alamos Medal by Los Alamos National Laboratory “for his groundbreaking contributions to science.”

In a November SFI Community Lecture, External Professor Michelle Girvan described an exciting new approach to predicting chaotic systems. Watch her talk here.