Population and the Environment Working Group and Short Course
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
Population and the Environment Working Group and Short Course
This Working Group / Short Course is generously supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and will be offered free of tuition for accepted students.
Working Group
October 13 - 14, 2018
Santa Fe Institute
1399 Hyde Park Road
Santa Fe, NM 87501
Short Course
October 15 - 16, 2018
Santa Fe Institute
1399 Hyde Park Road
Santa Fe, NM 87501
About this Short Course:
The relationship between human populations and the environments that support them may be the most significant issue bearing on our descendants. Yet rigorous treatments of this relationship, and its implications for applied population ethics, are regrettably sparse.
New quantitative methods and models have been developed in the fields of analytical demography, anthropology, economics, biology, and complexity science that can shed light on important dimensions of population-environment dynamics. These advances bring a number of new concepts that enrich classical models in demography and economics, including multi-agent models, heterogeneity, hidden variables, life history, development and aging, spatial dynamics, strategic games, social influence, network theory, cultural processes, and causal inference from sparse data.
To advance science education in this area, this 4-day event will bring together experts from diverse fields. In the first 2 days—the working group—the invited instructors will collaborate to synthesize knowledge in this area, and develop a curriculum targeted at a multi-disciplinary graduate-level audience. In the second 2 days—the short course—the instructors will work together to teach the newly developed curriculum to a group of participating students and early career scientists.
About SFI:
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is the leader in complex systems research. SFI was established by an interdisciplinary group of intellectual leaders and renegades, including Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann (Physics), Kenneth Arrow (Economics), and Phil Anderson (Physics). Today SFI is a nonprofit research institute with a notable reputation within academia. Some examples of techniques and theories pursued at SFI include agent-based modeling, genetic algorithms, network theory, evolutionary game theory, nonlinear dynamics, statistical physics, scaling theory, the theory of collective computation, information theory, and maximum entropy methods. ASU's transformative president Michael Crow has called SFI "a modern version of Plato's Academy." Rolling Stone Magazine called the SFI "a sort of Justice League of renegade geeks, where teams of scientists from disparate fields study the Big Questions." Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Cormac McCarthy comments on the Institute can be found here.
About SFI Education Short Courses:
The event aims, in particular, to engage young researchers from both the global north and south, as well as bring together researchers from diverse and complementary fields and backgrounds.