SFI Short Course 2017

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Collective Intelligence, Markets & Prediction Short Course

October 12-13, 2017
Midtown Manhattan - Private Club
7 W 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

About This NYC-based Course:
This accessible, two-day executive education course provides an intensive introduction to information aggregation mechanisms in complex systems. The focus will be on crowdsourcing and the wisdom of crowds, collective intelligence, prediction markets, forecasting under uncertainty, and the role of diversity. The concepts and tools we discuss will be useful for any system in which strategic decisions are made by heterogeneous, error-prone agents extracting regularities from noisy data--whether neurons, monkeys, portfolio managers, election pundits, or sports analytics teams trying to determine rankings.

Through lectures, exercises, interactive discussions with SFI faculty, prominent guest faculty from other institutions, and your fellow participants, you will gain understanding of how these concepts and tools might be applied to financial markets, sports analytics, intelligence analysis, election forecasting, design of hybrid AI and human intelligence systems, and optimizing search and team performance. This course does not require any prior knowledge of math or data analysis.

About SFI:
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is the leader in complex systems theory 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 non-profit 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, non-linear 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: goo.gl/viOH20

About SFI Short Courses:
Each year SFI offers between two and three short courses. The purpose of these short courses is to provide actionable insights from Institute's latest theoretical work to the public. Each year one short course is run at SFI in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A second short course is run in a different city each year. In 2016 the remote city was Austin, TX. For 2017, the remote city is New York City. More information about SFI's efforts to facilitate actionable insights from its theoretical work can be found here: santafe.edu/ACtioN. More information about SFI's general education programs can be found here: santafe.edu/education.

Course Topics:

• Collective Intelligence
• Crowdsourcing & Wisdom of Crowds
• Collective Behavior & Collective Computation
• Prediction Markets
• Information Aggregation
• Role of Diversity
• Prediction Under Uncertainty
• Information vs Influence
• Micro to Macro & Back