News

As artificial intelligence has become a regular part of our daily lives, companies have run into a serious problem: their ...
SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) has received a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Science. She shares the award with social psychologists Icek Ajzen, ...
Nearly 40% of U.S. cities analyzed in a new study in NPJ Complexity diverge from the common narrative that Republican-dominated areas have high levels of implicit racial bias while Democratic ...
Scientists usually use a hypergraph model to predict dynamic behaviors. But the opposite problem is interesting, too. What if researchers can observe the dynamics but don’t have access to a ...
In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing more deeply into their profession. A recent paper in Nature Human Behavior mapped the dependency relationships ...
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 ...
Medieval friar William of Ockham posited a famous idea: always pick the simplest explanation. Often referred to as the parsimony principle, “Ockham’s razor” has shaped scientific ...
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 ...
No matter how mundane or life-changing, the decisions we make are necessarily based on whatever limited information is available to us. If you’re weighing the risks of going outside during a pandemic, ...
Historians of philosophy are like painters; by giving an interpretation of another philosopher’s problems and concepts, they paint philosophical portraits. SFI Research Fellow Anthony Eagan paints ...