Santa Fe Institute

Catch up on our most recent Community Lecture: "Whom Do We Trust? How AI Is (Re)Shaping Our Interactions Today" with @gilliantett.  This was the third of six community lectures for 2025, and all are available to watch on SFI’s YouTube channel. Watch here:…

Tomorrow: the 3rd event in SFI’s 2025 Community Lecture Series! Join us at the Lensic Performing Arts Center for Gillian Tett’s lecture, “Whom Do We Trust? How AI Is (Re)Shaping Our Interactions Today” — 7:30pm. Free tickets: lensic.org/events/gillian… or watch the live stream on…

Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with Gillian Tett: “Whom Do We Trust? How AI Is (Re)Shaping Our Interactions Today”. July 22, 7:30pm at @TheLensic. How is AI changing trust in society? Join us in person or watch online on SFI's YouTube. Tickets:…

Artist Tristan Duke brings art and science together in his Glacial Optics project, documenting the Sierra Nevada’s rapidly melting glaciers with a camera lens made from ice, retracing John Muir’s earliest glacial surveys, and even developing giant photographs using Pinyon pine…

In this seminar, SFI External Professor Dmitri Tymoczko (Princeton University) explores universal mathematical structures underlying music’s fundamental elements: pulse, pitch, and transformed repetition. As well as its implications for how we understand music and broader…

This spring, SFI’s Board of Trustees elected Ian McKinnon and Sam Peters as Chair and Vice-Chair. Long-time SFI supporters with New Mexico roots, they bring decades of insight, generosity, and leadership to their new roles, alongside a renewed term for SFI President David…

An SFI workshop supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation explored whether the field of history — long focused on the particularity of human experience — can incorporate lessons learned from complexity science and evolutionary biology, without losing sight of human freedom…

What can ancient houses tell us about inequality?  A recent PNAS special feature, co-edited by Tim Kohler & Amy Bogaard, with contributions from Scott Ortman, uses data from 53,000 homes to trace how wealth disparities emerged, shifted, and narrowed over 10,000 years.…

How do we measure success, impact, and safety in #generativeAI models that engage with the world? Frontier labs in #AI searched for answers to this question at a studio co-organized by @GoogleDeepMind researchers and the SFI Office of Applied Complexity. Read more:…

In this SFI seminar, Daniel Messenger (Los Alamos National Lab) discusses how weak-form inference methods can be used to derive effective macroscale descriptions from microscale observations, like mean-field and coarse-grained models.  This approach, including the WSINDy…

SFI’s Anthony Eagan reviews "The Philosophy of Ted Chiang." He praises it as a rare, thoughtful look at how Chiang’s sci-fi raises deep philosophical questions, not by design, but as a natural part of his creative process, exploring time, consciousness, and agency. Read the…

Catch up on our recent Community Lecture with Kyle Harper! The lecture, Climate Change and Contagion — Complex Crises Past and Present, is available on SFI’s YouTube channel. youtube.com/live/fSyjmpCas…

Congratulations to SFI postdoctoral fellow Anna Clemencia Guerrero, a recipient of the Whitman Center Fellowship from the Marine Biological Laboratory. The 10-week fellowship supports Guerrero’s research on how scientists design imagery about the microscopic world and how those…

A common narrative in the U.S. links a city’s political leanings with the level of racial bias in that city. But these assumptions are often too simple, suggests a new study by SFI's Andrew Stier (@andrew_stier) and Brandon Ogbunu (@big_data_kane) in NPJ Complexity. Instead of…

Traditional models of cultural evolution haven’t held up in the face of modern-day constructs like social media and easy global travel. Last month, SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino and collaborators convened a working group to begin building new models that capture how norms…

Congratulations to SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji, one of this year's recipients of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Science! Banaji shares the award with four other social psychologists for revolutionizing how we understand and measure…