News + Events

A new model of how animals budget their energy sheds light on how they live and explains why they tend to evolve toward larger body sizes.

In November of 2019, 14 SFI postdocs withdrew to an isolated research location to accomplish, in just 72 hours, a monumental task — decoding the first complex communication from an alien civilization.

The Santa Fe Institute is accepting applications for the 2019 Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science (GWCSS). Apply by February 11, 2020.

In The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design, SFI External Professor Michael Kearns and his University of Pennsylvania colleague Aaron Roth offer a set of principled solutions based on the emerging science of socially aware algorithm design.

On October 18, a group of ten computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars from the Santa Fe Institute and The University of New Mexico submitted a formal response to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) proposal to dramatically revise the Fair Housing Act.

The Santa Fe Institute is accepting applications for its Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) summer program. Apply by January 7, 2019.

Through the new Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship, which launched September 1, SFI is bridging the gap between academia and industry.

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.

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.

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, creator of SFI’s online education platform, was named co-chair of SFI’s Science Board at its 2019 spring meeting.

SFI Science Board member Derek Smith has worked in academia, industry, and public health. He is using insights from his work at SFI to develop an evolution-inspired flu vaccine.