News + Events

SFI External Professor Mark Newman has updated his classic textbook on networks. Oxford University Press publishes Networks, second edition, in early September, 2018.

The notion that an attractive person is “out of your league” doesn’t often dissuade dating hopefuls – at least online. In fact, the majority of online daters seek out partners who are more desirable than themselves, suggests a new large-scale analysis published in Science Advances.

In this SFI Community Lecture, science writer Sabine Hossenfelder explains what physicists mean when they say a theory is beautiful, what went wrong with their reliance on it, and how the field can move on. Watch her talk.

SFI External Professor Steen Rasmussen was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2018 ALIFE conference in Tokyo, Japan.

SFI welcomes ten new professors to our external faculty, a cohort of academics who enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex systems science, and connect us to over 70 institutions around the globe.

A small cadre of scientists and entrepreneurs convened a two-week long SFI working group to address the growing gap between our physical and social technologies.

Neuroscientists and complexity scientists meet to develop new tools for studying the brain as a complex network. Their working group, titled “Cognitive Regime Shift: When the Brain Breaks,” is part of SFI’s Aging, Adaptation, and the Arrow of Time research theme, funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

In a paper published in Science Advances, researchers from the Santa Fe Institute describe a new algorithm called SpringRank that uses wins and losses to quickly find rankings lurking in large networks. When tested on a wide range of synthetic and real-world datasets, ranging from teams in an NCAA college basketball tournament to the social behavior of animals, SpringRank outperformed other ranking algorithms in predicting outcomes and in efficiency.

New books by SFI Authors, highlighted in the Summer 2018 Parallax, inclue Ten Thousand Years of Inequality, and The Emergence of Premodern States.

This question of how the collective influences individual performance is central to the work of SFI’s investigation into the limits of human performance. In a workshop that takes place June 25-27, experts from a range of disciplines, including physiology, organizational behavior, sports analytics and applied mathematics, explore how the collective affects the individual.

Recent breakthroughs in nonequilibrium statistical physics have revealed opportunities to advance the "thermodynamics of computation," a field that could have far-reaching consequences for how we understand, and engineer, our computers.

The latest scientific understanding of time, and how time shapes our experience, were subjects of a June 19 panel discussion between physicist James Hartle, cosmologist Sean Carroll, evolutionary theorist David Krakauer, and science writer Jenniffer Ouellette. Watch the panel discussion.

SFI Professor David Wolpert has been included in a NASA Group Achievement Award for his work on the Machine Learning and Data Sciences Team.

An SFI workshop brings together thinkers in disciplines ranging from cosmology to chronobiology to neuroscience to explore how different timescales emerge.

On June 11, the SFI Press released the second volume in its Seminar Series, The Emergence of Premodern States, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and Paula L.W. Sabloff. This project tackles one of the most deceptively simple inquiries in archaeology: How did humans transition from hunter-gatherer societies into states — collective entities that are the movers and shakers of the modern world?

This week at SFI, scientists from fields ranging from hydrology and environmental engineering to political science and economics explore the interplay of environmental conditions and society around water.

An SFI working group meets to sort through the many ways to think about cumulative cultural evolution.  

An SFI team led by Professor Mirta Galesic has received a nearly $500,000 grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study how people form beliefs about genetically modified crops.

External Professor Constantino Tsallis has been elected as a member of the Academia de Ciencias de America Latina

We humans make social judgments about ourselves and others that can appear contradictory. A new Social Sampling Model, presented by Professor Mirta Galesic and External Professor Henrik Olsson, suggest these apparently conflicting judgments can be explained by a single quantitative theory.