Out of the box thinking touching tomorrows world with todays science 2016 - faculty 2016

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Program Director

Sander Bais, Program Director

Faculty: Out of the Box

Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Professor, Santa Fe Institute; Scientist 5, Los Alamos National Laboratory, T-2

Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Ph.D., SFI Professor and TSM, Los Alamos National Laboratory, T-8. Dr. Bhattacharya attended the Indian Institute of Technology where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1982 and Master of Science degree in 1984. In 1989, Dr. Bhattacharya received his Doctorate of Philosophy in Physics from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He then joined the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Brookhaven in Long Island as a postdoctoral fellow. After two years in Long Island, Dr. Bhattacharya moved to France to work at Service de Physique Theorique. In November 1992, he moved back to the United States to join the high-energy particle theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as a postdoc and in 1999 he became a regular staff member at Los Alamos Labs. Dr. Bhattacharya joined SFI as part time resident faculty in 2005. Dr. Bhattachary's research areas include: Physics of Complex Systems; Emergence and Innovation in Evolutionary Systems; Dynamics and Quantitative Studies of Human Behavior; and Emergence, Organization and Dynamics of Living Systems.

Ellen Bradbury-Reid

Ellen Bradbury Reid moved to Los Alamos in the summer of 1944 when her father was hired by Norris Bradbury to work in the high explosives division. Reid recalls what it was like growing up as a child at Los Alamos and shares stories about her adventures into the Los Alamos hillside with her younger brother. She also shares memories of attending school in Los Alamos and discusses the diversity of the student body. Reid also recalls some of her encounters with famous scientists working on the atomic bomb, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.

Mirta Galesic, Professor, Santa Fe Institute, Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics, Santa Fe Institute

Mirta Galesic is Professor and Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute, and Adjunct Researcher at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. She studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with properties of the external environment to produce seemingly complex social phenomena.

In one line of research, she investigates how apparent cognitive biases in social judgments emerge as a product of the interplay of well-adapted minds and the statistical structure of social environments. In another, she studies how different combinations of search, stop, and decision rules for social learning perform in different social network structures. A third line of research examines the origins of humans’ uniquely profound cooperation. Mirta uses agent-based models to study how the increased value of group foraging in nutritionally poor and scarcely populated human habitats of Early Pleistocene might have promoted food sharing and other forms of cooperation.

She also studies risk and uncertainty in complex systems, in particular in financial, medical, and environmental domains. Related projects include developing a sampling framework for understanding uncertainty in environmental decisions, studying simple rules for financial decisions, and communicating medical risks to the general public by means of different information formats.

Mirta has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and co-edited a book. She received the 2013 Jane Beattie Award for Innovation in Decision Research from the European Association for Decision Making.

Stephen Guerin, President of RedfishGroup

Stephen Guerin is currently President of RedfishGroup, a R&D consultancy based in Santa Fe, New Mexico applying the emerging science of Complex Adaptive Systems. His work centers on visualization, modeling and the design of self-organizing systems.

Stephen recently served on the National Science Foundation's Human & Social Dynamics Grant Review Committee and lectures on agent-based modeling and visualization as a faculty member of Santa Fe Institute's Complex Systems Summer School.

Between 2000 and 2002, Stephen worked as a Senior Software Developer at BiosGroup and participated as a member of Stuart Kauffman's research group. Stephen Guerin started researching chaotic systems as they applied to economic systems and business cycles in 1989. He founded RedfishGroup in 1991 to provide special effects animation, video editing and commercial printing. Operations were shifted to Beijing in 1994 to develop a series of Chinese language translation tools. RedfishGroup went on to provide Internet programming and consulting to multinational and Chinese firms with presences in Beijing and Shanghai. After returning from China in 1997, Stephen spent a few years of research in Cognitive Science looking for applications to distributed software systems. RedfishGroup's long-term mission is to create living software systems.

Stephen lives in Santa Fe with his wife Alison and two young sons.

John Miller, Chair, Science Steering Committee, External Professor; Professor of Economics and Social Science, Carnegie Mellon University

My research focuses on the complex adaptive behavior that emerges in social systems. The goal of this work is to understand the principles by which aggregate patterns emerge from the simple interactions of individual adaptive agents. The nonlinear and disequilibrium nature of complex adaptive systems often necessitates new methodological and theoretical directions. Methodologically, computational methods provide a convenient tool for modeling such systems. Theoretically, standard analytic tools, based on both linearity and equilibrium behavior, may be ill-tuned to further our understanding of complex systems. Thus, new approaches that emphasize nonlinearities and dynamics are needed.

To understand the behavior of complex adaptive systems, I have relied on the analysis of computational models composed of interacting artificial adaptive agents. The behavior of each agent in the system is dictated by a simple learning algorithm (e.g., genetic algorithm) that allows the agent to adaptively modify its actions from a set of behaviors rich in possibilities. This paradigm allows the analysis of flexible, yet precise, models of well-defined agents in an environment that can be easily and rapidly replicated and recovered. The ability to interact directly with such open-ended models allows one to quickly generate, develop and test new hypotheses.

Using artificial adaptive agent models, my colleagues and I have been able to analyze some central social phenomena. For example, we have explored the dynamics of political platforms in spatial elections, the emergence of cooperation strategic choice in simple two-person games, and bidding behavior in auction markets. To understand the fundamental dynamics of price formation in simple markets, we designed and organized an international computerized double auction tournament. This tournament allowed us to create an "artificial world" of trading agents in which we explored a variety of theoretical and practical issues.

Complementing the above work, I have also pursued experimental and pure mathematical approaches to many of the above issues. Experimentally, colleagues and I are trying to uncover the rational limits of cooperation. Mathematically, we are working on a precise characterization of the dynamic behavior of complex adaptive systems. This work, which incorporates results from theoretical physics, chemistry, and biology, attempts to uncover new mathematical models that unify seemingly disparate adaptive systems.

Using the methods outlined above, previously inaccessible, yet fundamental, questions are now becoming amenable to analysis.

Geoffrey West, Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. West served as SFI President from July 2005 through July 2009. Prior to joining the Santa Fe Institute as a Distinguished Professor in 2003, he was the leader, and founder, of the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he is one of only approximately ten Senior Fellows.

His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena evolved into a highly productive collaboration on the origin of universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale up through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems. This led to the development of realistic quantitative models for the structural and functional design of organisms based on underlying universal principles. This work, begun at the Institute, has received much attention in both the scientific and popular press, and provides a framework for quantitative understanding of problems ranging from fundamental issues in biology (such as cell size, growth, metabolic rate, DNA nucleotide substitution rates, and the structure and dynamics of ecosystems) to questions at the forefront of medical research (such as aging, sleep, and cancer). Among his current interests is the extension of these ideas to understand quantitatively the structure and dynamics of social organizations, such as cities and corporations, including the relationships between economies of scale, growth, innovation and wealth creation and their implications for long-term survivability and sustainability. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was one of their Centenary Speakers in 2003. He has been a lecturer in many popular and distinguished scientist series worldwide, as well as at the World Economic Forum. Among recent honors he was a co-receiver of the Mercer Award from the Ecological Society of America, the Weldon Memorial Prize (2005), Oxford University and the Glenn Award for research on Aging and the APS Szilard Award (2013). In 2006 he was named one of Time magazine's"100 Most Influential People in the World" and his work selected as one of the breakthrough ideas of 2007 by the Harvard Business Review. He is the author of several books, a visiting Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London, and an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University.

West received his BA from Cambridge University in 1961 and his doctorate from Stanford University in 1966, where he returned in 1970 to become a member of the faculty. West is married to Jacqueline West, a psychologist in private practice; they have two children: Joshua, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California and an Olympic silver-medalist. Devorah, is studying International Studies at Stanford.

David Wolpert, Professor, Santa Fe Institute

David Wolpert comes from Los Alamos where he was the Ulam scholar at the Center for Nonlinear Studies. Before that he was at NASA Ames Research Center and a consulting professor at Stanford University, where he formed the Collective Intelligence group. He has worked at IBM and a data mining startup, and been external faculty at numerous institutions (including the Santa Fe Institute). His current research focuses on i) Information theory and Game theory ii) The second law of thermodynamics and dynamics of complexity iii) Multi-information source optimization iv) The mathematical underpinnings of reality v) Evolution of organizations His degrees are in physics, from UC Santa Barbara and from Princeton. He is the author of three books, three patents, over one hundred refereed papers, and has received numerous awards.

Faculty: ACN Smyposium

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Staff

Juniper Lovato, Santa Fe Institute

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