Artificial-intelligence systems have made remarkable progress in recent years, but they still struggle with the kind of ...

In the 1980s and ’90s, SFI played laboratory to a promising new method known as agent-based modeling. In ensuing decades, agent-based models (ABMs) proliferated across many fields, including economics ...

SFI Resident Professor Melanie Mitchell has received a 2025 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Global markets are complex systems, shaped by feedback loops, sudden shocks, and adaptive behavior that rarely follow textbook rules and that can’t be captured by neat equations. At its core, ...

Giambattista Vico, in his foundational treatise The New Science, argued that humans can only truly know that which we have made ourselves. Language, art, literature, religion — these cultural elements ...

External Faculty are central to SFI’s identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to ...

SFI postdoctoral fellow Kaleda Denton has been recognized by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology as the runner-up for the 2025 John Maynard Smith Prize for outstanding young biologists.

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 ...

For more than 100 years, electric companies in the U.S. have maintained the same basic business model, carefully fine-tuned to sometimes conflicting local, state, and federal regulation. But over the ...

SFI External Professor and Science Steering Committee member Michelle Girvan (University of Maryland) has been elected President of the Network Science Society, an organization that supports an ...

The sudden emergence of witch trials in early modern Europe may have been fueled by one of humanity's most significant intellectual milestones: the invention of the printing press in 1450. “Cities ...

Networks, which include nodes and connections, can help researchers model dynamic systems like the spread of disease or how the brain processes information. Pairwise interactions between nodes can ...