News + Events

During Earth’s last glacial period, temperatures on the planet periodically spiked dramatically and rapidly. A new paper in the journal Chaos by SFI's Joshua Garland, Liz Bradley, and coauthors suggests that mathematics from information theory could offer a powerful tool for analyzing and understanding them.

Ashley Teufel and Luis Zaman's working group, “The Point of No Return,” seeks to identify the underlying properties driving entrenchment, a phenomenon in which a single event can have a widespread effect on an entire system, and find ways to infer, predict or even control it.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a solid history of how we got from pocket calculators to facial recognition and self-driving cars, a lucid tour of how these systems operate, and a measured warning against placing more trust in these systems than they deserve.

The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution is one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory. But a new paper by Sam Bowles and  Jung-Kyoo Choi shows that most explanations for it don’t agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation.

Jessica Flack presents an SFI Community Lecture on collective computation at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on October 22.

External Professor Raissa D’Souza has won the Network Science Society’s inaugural Euler award for her influential work in "the discovery and study of explosive percolation in networks and the insights it provided to explosive synchronization and network optimization.”

SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur has been selected as a 2019 Citation Laureate by the Web of Science group “for research revealing network effects in economic systems that produce increasing returns."

A television production written and hosted by SFI Professor Cris Moore won a 2019 Rocky Mountain Emmy Award in the instructional/informational category.

SFI's Sidney Redner and Paul Krapivsky of Boston University have a new mathematical take on a classic problem.  

Seven thousand years ago, societies across Eurasia began to show signs of lasting divisions between haves and have-nots. In new research published in the journal Antiquity, scientists chart the precipitous surge of prehistoric inequality and trace its economic origins back to the adoption of ox-drawn plows.

Why it is that only some crimes supercharge from city size is explained in a new paper published this week in Physical Review E.  According to Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Vicky Chuqiao Yang and her coauthors, the same underlying mechanism that boosts urban innovation and startup businesses can also explain why certain types of crimes thrive in a larger population.       

In a Topical Meeting for Applied Complexity Network (ACTioN) members, SFI delves into the complexity of commerce, September 12.

For three days this fall, biologists, physicists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists gather for an SFI workshop to investigate the links between computational theory and biological systems. 

Infectious disease outbreaks often emerge when and where we are least equipped to detect and control them. In a series of two lectures, SFI External Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers discusses how network-based mathematical models data accelerate the detection and containment of outbreaks.
 

Reckless Ideas will feature high on the agenda of the sixth Postdocs in Complexity Conference, the latest in a twice-yearly series held at SFI and generously funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF). The conference, to take place Aug. 27-30, brings together early-career complexity postdoctoral fellows in a wide range of disciplines from institutions around the world.

For over a century, anthropologists have attempted to describe human societies as “matrilineal” or “patrilineal” — emphasizing relatedness among women or men, respectively. A new paper by Laura Fortunato, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, argues that it is time to confront the ambiguity at the heart of these terms.  

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.

On August 21-22, SFI celebrates Stuart Kauffman’s contributions to complex systems science in the workshop “Thirty Years of Complex Systems Thinking.” The two-day workshop covers new research linked to Kauffman’s adventurous career.

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.