This summer’s lineup of SFI schools and internships, integrated closely with the Institute’s scientific work, wrapped up in August. Here are some highlights:
Research experiences for UndergradsTen undergrads spent 10 weeks at SFI working on projects with SFI faculty. As her project, Emily Lichko, a junior physics major at the University of Michigan, used a combination of phylogenetic trees and agent-based modeling to track how cultural traits are transmitted among generations within a population. She worked with SFI Professor Tanmoy Bhattacharya and Omidyar Fellows Anne Kandler and Laura Fortunato.
Lichko says she was fascinated by the range of subjects to which complexity science can be applied. “Learning how to critically evaluate models from many disciplines is one of the most important things I will bring back,” she says. “I am better able to make connections and recognize ideas that are applicable to my own work.”
Summaries of all the REU students’ projects are available at www.santafe.edu/education/fellow ships/undergraduate/reu-2011/complex systems summer school Fifty graduate students and postdocs were selected for SFI’s three-week crash course in the fundamental concepts of complex systems science.
The research topics chosen by the 2011 CSSS students were as varied as the disciplines they represented. Final presentations ranged from in-depth analyses of their favorite topics using new modeling tools to enthusiastic explorations of questions still to be answered. Videos of the student presentations are available at www. santafe.edu.
Two students, overwhelmed by the volume of information available on a defunct pueblo and the challenge of modeling its complete food web, pulled out their guitars and sang the Complexity Blues. The first few bars went like this:
Wild res been burnin’ baby Since the day that we arrived
They closed off Atalaya Yesterday at five
They’re waiting for a rainstorm
At Los Alamos National Lab
But we can make our own lightning In Alfred Hübler’s lab
Never seen such robustness The system cannot fail Lorenz attract me babe Complexity’s the holy grail
I wanna learn these theories
Until my brain starts to quake
Here at SFI
We work and play until we break...
complexity and Modeling Program
Games of Capture the Flag and Marco Polo are staples of many summer camp experiences. But the 14 high school students who participated in SFI’s Summer Complexity and Modeling Program (CAMP) at the Groton School in Groton, Mass., used these games to model network theory and observe how patterns emerge in chaos.
The two-week program aims to foster transdisciplinary collaboration and inspire students to become complexity scholars. In one research project, CAMPers ventured into the woodlands of Massachusetts to collect data on beaver foraging, then returned to the classroom and used NetLogo to model the data they collected.
“Looking back on the program, we had an incredible group of students who are talented in a variety of disciplines,” says Juniper Lovato, CAMP coordinator. “We had a lot of fun!”