News + Events

AI and the Barrier of Meaning 2, a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute on April 24–26, brought together experts working in AI, cognitive science, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, and law. Videos of the talks from the workshop are now available on YouTube. Similar to the first AI and the Barrier of Meaning workshop, held in 2018, the event focused on questions related to “understanding” and what it means to “extract meaning” in a humanlike way.

Most people think of a disease outbreak when they hear the word “contagion.” But it’s a concept that extends beyond pathogens. It could be an infectious disease, a fad, an online meme, or even a positive behavior in a population. An April 19–21 workshop will explore the dynamics of interacting contagions. 

A February 22–24, 2023 working group explores the relationship between regeneration, robustness, and failure.

SFI will host a three-day Collective Intelligence Symposium & Short Course on June 20–23, 2023, focusing on foundational ideas like first principles to help establish a rigorous approach to the study of collective intelligence. The event will also leap into unexplored possibilities through a Radical Ideas competition. Applications are required for all participants, and the priority deadline is February 1, 2023.

In November, Brian Enquist, Mary O’Connor, and Chris Kempes organized a workshop to take stock of advances in biological scaling theory since the publication of a seminal book for the field.

This summer, 38 Ph.D. students from the U.S. and Europe gathered in Vienna, Austria, for SFI’s first Complexity-GAINs international summer school to better understand the dynamics of societies, with an eye toward preventing disintegration.

Research jams are among the highlights of the biannual JSMF–SFI Postdocs in Complexity Conference. This fall, two micro-working groups met in the week leading up to the conference to make progress on conversations they began at the meeting last spring. 

The October 13–14 workshop "Coding the Past: The Challenges and Promise of Large-Scale Cultural Databases" meets to train a group of researchers to use the new online Database of Religious History.

At the crossroads of computer science and computational science, the emerging field of scientific machine learning focuses on harnessing new ideas in machine learning together with predictive physics-based models to solve complex, real-world problems. On October 10–12, a group met to collaborate on new ideas about using scientific machine learning in complex fields.

Our financial, supply, energy, belief, and political systems are undergoing regime shifts. On October 3, SFI researchers and members of ACtioN and SFI’s Complexity Society met to explore these regime shifts from a complex systems perspective.

This October 22 & 23, SFI will reprise the InterPlanetary Festival. In partnership with SITE Santa Fe, this year’s festival offers an intimate setting with limited seating, and content simulcast to multiple screens in Santa Fe's Railyard Park and streamed online. 

Imagine a bookshelf that stretches far into the distance, laden with genre fiction: potboilers, romances, thrillers. Farther down, we glimpse the royal blue of a Fitzcarraldo edition. The catch? Every book has the same author: E. Machina. They’ve all been written by AI. To SFI External Professor Dan Rockmore (Dartmouth College), we’re closer than we think to the world of that bookstore. The working group “The Anxiety of the Computational” explores questions about how AI-written literature might impact the humanities.

Ten percent of carbon burned on Earth comes from devices like your cellphone, quietly computing even when you aren’t looking at it. Developing a greater understanding of the thermodynamics of computation like that done by your cellphone is critical to reducing energy use. It is also critical to understanding a host of deep, long-standing scientific problems. An Aug. 15–17 workshop, "The Thermodynamics of Natural and Artificial Distributed Computational Systems," meets to identify challenges, opportunities, and priorities to push forward scientific investigations of this topic. 

At present, the global economy is experiencing structural changes that often seem unprecedented. Rapid technological evolution, climate migration, demographic shifts, and deepening inequality all contribute to the current flux of economic systems. The threat of economic reconfiguration also appears to be fueling political polarization around the globe. In light of the current patterns that researchers are observing, many seek new methods to understand the mechanisms that shape the new landscape. An August 8-12 working group explores “How Can Complexity Economics Give More Insight into Political Economy?” 

To address climate change and other societal challenges like rising inequality, human migration, and biodiversity loss, humanity must consider the ecological, economic, and political constraints of our planetary systems. In late July, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, hosted a workshop to discuss these considerations and foster collaboration across research communities. SFI co-hosted the workshop in partnership with ICTP and the Fondazione Internazionale Trieste. 

After two years of online-only and postponed events, SFI's summer education programs are back in person. June brought students from around the world to participate in the Undergraduate Complexity Research, Complex Systems Summer School, Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science, and Advanced Graduate Workshop programs. 

From its inception in 2017, the Santa Fe Institute’s Research Coordination Network has been bringing interdisciplinary researchers together to study life’s possible origins. This summer, SFI hosts two working groups through the RCN: “Feasible but Undiscovered Metabolisms,” from July 11–16, and “Multiple Life,” from August 22–26. 

In a June 14-16 SFI workshop, “The Structure of Technology,” researchers seek to develop better frameworks to capture how technology emerges, takes shape, and shapes the world in turn. The workshop is the first of a series of meetings that are taking place through SFI’s Emergent Political Economies grant and research theme. 

The immune system is almost fantastically complex, and many basic questions remain unanswered about how it manages to keep us safe from intruders without attacking our own tissues. A June 8-10 SFI working group, Distributed Computing Perspectives on Theoretical Immunology, gathered a diverse community of researchers to both revisit classic problems in immunology with a fresh face and ask what new questions have arisen, taking advantage of recent developments in both biology and computer science.

SFI's two-day working group “Language as a window into mind and society” will discuss the many powerful roles language plays in the human mind and in our societies, and how our implicit biases flow into the language-based technologies we build.