Diversity Short Course
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
Complexity of Diversity Short Course
March 22, 2018
Salesforce West
50 Fremont Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
March 23, 2018
The Exploratorium
Pier 15 (Embarcadero at Green Street)
San Francisco, CA 94111
About this Short Course:
Why is diversity so important and what role does diversity play in discovery, problem solving, adaptability, and robustness? This accessible two-day executive education course provides an intensive introduction to the functions of diversity in complex systems. Through lectures, exercises, and interactive discussions with prominent SFI faculty and your fellow participants, you will explore the relationship between diversity and resilience, adaptability, and the nature of collective decision-making. There will be particular emphasis on applications that are relevant for managers, executives, and board members. Specific focal areas include questions of social power, leadership, decision-making, and long-term resilience. The course content will be entirely scientific and rely on replicated empirical findings, rigorous models, basic mechanisms, and performance-oriented data analysis. Despite the scientific nature of the course’s content, this course does not require prior knowledge of math, computer science, or complexity science. Tools will be explained as the material requires.
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 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, Texas. For 2017, the remote city is New York City. In 2018, the remote city will be the San Francisco Bay Area. 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.