News + Events

A June working group meets to learn more about how public opinion changes, and how quickly.

A special themed issue of the journal Entropy gathers together "new developments and original applications of generalized statistical mechanics to complex systems of various natures.”

Borne out of a transdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute working group, Law as Data, edited by Michael Livermore and Dan Rockmore, explores the new field of computational legal analysis — the study of the law that uses legal texts as data.

How do you get an artificial intelligence to become more trustworthy? You teach it to think like a baby. The question and answer might read like a joke. Yet, as SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell explains in an essay for Aeon, teaching AI systems to think more like babies is one of the strategies that scientists are starting to deploy to create better AI.

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate who revealed symmetry and order in the world of subatomic particles and leveled his genius at complex mysteries of life and mind, died peacefully May 24, 2019. He was 89 years old.

The second annual InterPlanetary Festival lands June 14-16, 2019 in Santa Fe’s Railyard Park.

A May working group brings critics of urban scaling theory to engage in respectful dialogue with SFI scientists in the Social Reactors project.

Agent-based modeling has been used to study everything from economics to biology to political science to business and management. This July, programmers and non-programmers alike can learn to model by enrolling in Introduction to Agent-based Modeling, an online course offered through SFI's Complexity Explorer.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019 physicist Jean Carlson discussed the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time.

In 2018, SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales won the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Montaigne Medal for his bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. He won another Eric Hoffer award in 2019 in the Legacy Nonfiction category for Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival.

The working group, "Macroecological Insights into Microbiome Resilience and Function," meets at SFI May 8-9 to attempt to link the macro and micro branches of biology.

This June, Complexity Explorer offers its first course based on unsettled research into the "Origins of Life."

In a themed issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, a collection of papers explores the differences between "liquid" and "solid" brains, their varied abilities to perform computations, and their inherent limits. 

New books by SFI Authors, highlighted in the Spring 2019 Parallax, inclue The Human Network, Emerging Syntehses in Science, and Life Finds a Way.

SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Tyler Marghetis.

SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Stefani Crabtree

SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Helena Miton.

SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow David Kinney

A new analysis of academic productivity finds researchers' current working environments better predict their future success than the prestige of their doctoral training.

While time and age in standard dynamical systems are treated as simple clocks that run at a constant rate, the human experience of age is measured by consequences. In this talk on Tuesday, May 21 at 7:30 p.m., physicist Jean Carlson will illustrate the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time through examples taken from her research and focus areas of a five-year Santa Fe Institute research theme.