Traditional models of how culture spreads were designed to describe early civilizations, typically focused on ...

SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) has received a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award ...

A recent study by SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Andrew Steir and Professor Brandon Ogbunu in NPJ Complexity shows that many U.S.

SFI External Professors Alison Gopnik and Scott Page are among 120 new members of the National Academy of Sciences announced this week. Election to NAS recognizes the members’ “distinguished and ...

In a network, pairs of individual elements, or nodes, connect to each other; those connections can represent a sprawling system with myriad individual links. A hypergraph goes deeper: It gives ...

In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing more deeply into their profession. Computer programmers need a solid foundation in basic mathematics; nurses must gain ...

The oceans teem with photosynthesizing bacteria, tiny-tailed dinoflagellates gobbling other plankton, algae surrounded by intricate glass skeletons. In the 1960s, the ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson ...

Large language models like GPT-4, the one behind ChatGPT, train on vast stores of data to complete one task: Produce a convincing sequence of words in response to a user’s written request. The tools ...

Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with others, or ...

In fields ranging from immunology and ecology to economics and thermodynamics, multi-scale complex systems are ubiquitous. They are also notoriously difficult to model. Conventional approaches take ...