News + Events

Are Big Data and predictive analytics truly a gold mine for business, science, and government? Or are they a serious threat to our privacy and freedom? Chris Wood offers perspectives from a recent SFI meeting in Santa Fe.

In Forbes, Jonathan Haidt and David Sloan Wilson posit that Darwinian evolution is a good starting point for a grand theory of business, citing research by SFI External Professor Herbert Gintis.

SFI’s annual Business Network and Board of Trustees Symposium in Santa Fe this weekend will explore both the promise and the limits of Big Data, as well as the value of theory in the Big Data context.

In a September 30 Business Network topical meeting in London, participants explored the evolution of the modern corporation, the corporate life cycle, the impact of globalization, and the relationship between corporations and other major social institutions.

"Equilibrium is dead," says SFI Business Network member Tim Hodgson of Towers Watson, in an article about the role of complex systems thinking in investment.

Network theorists usually assume blackouts spread the same way diseases do – by close contact – but for power grids “the relevant network is not the physical network” of lines and towers and transfer stations, says SFI Professor Cris Moore.

In a column in Forbes, SFI Trustee John Chisholm asks whether the theoretical, scientific study of complex systems can inform the hardscrabble world of start-up firms.

A June SFI Business Network topical meeting in Austin on innovation drew 100 artists, musicians, business executives, entrepreneurs, academics, investors, and reporters, according to an article in Silicon Hills (Austin/San Antonio).

Ever wonder what SFI scientists like to think about? How many countries SFI External Professors represent? Who SFI's 300-plus donors are? SFI's 2012 Annual Report contains this and much more.

SFI today announced that its Omidyar Fellows program will be expanded for 2013, with enhancements designed to sharpen the program’s focus on preparing promising early-career scientists to lead tomorrow’s most critical scientific research.

In his blog "Compounding My Interests," Elliott Turner recounts the high points of a recent SFI Business Network meeting, "Risk: The Human Factor," held at Morgan Stanley in New York.

In a February community lecture, Brian Christian shared his experiences as a "confederate" in an annual man vs. computer "Turing Test," offering insights on ways computers are reshaping what it means to be human. Watch his presentation here.

SFI President Jerry Sabloff tells readers of the Santa Fe New Mexican what the Institute does, and why 2012 is a year for asking big questions at SFI.

The Santa Fe Institute is seeking nominations and applications for resident faculty positions.

New research suggests that ideas from biology could be the key to quickly fixing problems in the large, highly co-evolved, and connected software systems we rely on in business, government, and academia.

Research conducted by Samuel Bowles, SFI Professor, and colleagues on small-scale societies, ranging from egalitarian hunter gatherers to hierarchical farmers and herders in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, concludes that the degree of wealth inequality in a society is based on inheritance. This variation in inequality is explained by a dynamic model in which a population’s long-run steady-state level of inequality depends on the extent to which its most important forms of wealth are transmitted within families across generations. The passing on of material things such as farms, herds and other real property, or even knowledge, skills and other valuable resources plays a large role in whether the next generation will accumulate or maintain high wealth status.

Consider what the state of science would be without the microscope, the telescope, or a more recent technical advance like automated DNA sequencing. There would still be science, rooted in human perception and reason. But it would be far less potent than modern science, which has technologically expanded the senses, and with computers, the intellect, to explore and decipher reality, from the universe itself to the most elusive subatomic particle. The popular view is that technology is the handmaiden of science — less pure, more commercial. But in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead.

A trove of material from the first SFI Global Sustainability Summer School is available for free to the public online. The scientists highlighted the following conclusions on climate and energy: Scientific evidence that our release of greenhouse gases risks dangerously warming the climate is incontrovertible. The technologies needed to start solving the problem exist today and many are ready for large-scale implementation, though a full solution will require a major commitment to further research and innovation. These low-carbon technologies represent a large economic opportunity, but the ordinary course of innovation and technological diffusion is too slow to meet the challenge of addressing climate change. Large-scale government intervention is therefore needed to accelerate this process.

There is a new service helping people in Uganda, who don’t have access to computers, find answers to their questions. Question Box was started and has been successful. Workers use their cell phones to call the Question Box call center to ask a question for locals. The call center then gives them the answer. The worker is then given free minutes for their cell phone usage. SFI Omidyar Fellow Nathan Eagle has been doing research on cellphones and development in Africa. Eagle also runs a cellphone-based business in Kenya. Eagle states, “We can’t sit in our offices in America and decide what is useful to people and what is meaningful in their lives. The services only add value if they are open-ended.”

SFI External Professor Carlos Castillo-Chavez is one of a group of mathematics and science professors who have called on the United States government to support institutional programs that have been successful in attracting and retaining minority students. According to Castillo-Chavez, many of the Chinese and Indian scientists and mathematicians are returning to their home countries. In order to keep up with researching and learning, the US will need to step up mathematics scholarships to universities.