News + Events

A small working group at SFI outlines possible new directions for research at the interface between economics, public policy, and philosophy.

The Santa Fe Institute again has ranked among the world's top science and technology and transdisciplinary think tanks.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

Sending instantaneous messages across long distances, or quickly computing over ungodly amounts of data are just two possibilities that arise if we can design computers to exploit quantum uncertainty, entanglement, and measurement. In this SFI Community Lecture, scientist Christopher Monroe describes the architecture of a quantum computer based on individual atoms, suspended and isolated with electric fields, and individually addressed with laser beams.

An SFI workshop examines the key impediments to building machines that understand meaning, and how much understanding is necessary for artificially intelligent machines to approach human-level abilities in language, perception, and reasoning.

Two October meetings at SFI aim to dig into some of the trickiest questions about life, both here on Earth, and how we might recognize it elsewhere in the universe.

The autumn Applied Complexity Network meeting “Risk: Retrospective Lessons and Prospective Strategies,” explores what we have learned since the financial crisis of 2008.

In a two-part lecture series September 24 and 25, SFI Professor Cristopher Moore looked at two sides of computation — the mathematical structures that make problems easy or hard, and the growing debate about fairness in algorithmic predictions. The videos are now available.

The fourth bi-annual Postdocs in Complexity Conference at the Santa Fe Institute provides networking opportunities for early career researchers working on complex systems science, as well as special sessions from SFI faculty and other prominent speakers. This three-day conference will build on the themes of the previous three Postdocs in Complexity meetings, refining the structure to allow additional time to build community and focus on collaborations.

The bane of the language-learner is a goldmine for linguists, cultural evolutionists, and computer scientists, a group of whom will meet at SFI Aug. 27–28, 2018. Given the messy state of linguistic affairs, they ask, is it possible to quantitatively encode “meaning” independent of any particular language?