Complexity Explorer Santa Few Institute

Welcome to the first every Complexity Challenge, brought to you by the Santa Fe Institute and Mitre Corporation.  The details of this Challenge will remain hidden until the start date.  Challenge participants are asked to enroll without knowing what those details are.  Challenges are designed to be completely open to any approach so participants can apply their own expertise.  There are no right solutions!

This first Challenge will feature pre-selected participants who have been invited to help work out the kinks of this new learning experience.  The Challenge will be capped at 50 participants for this session.  

About the Instructor

John Miller is Chair of the Science Steering Committee and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.  He is also a Professor of Economics and Social Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Social and Decision Sciences.  He received a B.A. in Economics and B.S. in Finance from the University of Colorado and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan.  He joined the Santa Fe Institute as their first post doctoral fellow in 1988. His research focuses on complex adaptive social systems. He was born and raised in Denver, Colorado---the fourth generation of a family of ranchers.

Course Team:

Matt L. Miller is a doctoral student at the University of California at Davis. Matt studies coordination, cooperation, and the emergence of prosocial behavior. His research primarily involves agent-based models, but also encompasses analytical models of evolution, multilevel statistical models, and structural equation modeling. If you've got a question about algorithms or code speed optimization in Java, Matt's a good guy to ask. He is also a good resource for data analysis in R. Matt is a NSF graduate fellow who escaped the IT world to study psychology, but once again frequently finds himself stuck in windowless rooms with stacks of humming computers.

Antonio Sirianni is a PhD Candidate in the sociology department at Cornell University.  Prior to his graduate studies he earned a BS in Psychology, and then worked as a data scientist for a large e-commerce company. He currently studies group processes, systems of social control, and various forms of social network analysis. Methodologically his work employs statistical analysis of large data sets harvested from various corners of the internet and social simulation/agent-based modeling.

Catriona Sissons is a PhD candidate in the physics department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.  Her research is in the broad area of complex science and networks. Most generally she is interested in understanding the evolution and spread of knowledge and new ideas in society. With a background in physics, law and philosophy, she is interested in applying tools from statistical physics and mathematics to represent and model empirical datasets to understand the behaviour of large scale of economic and social networks. 

About Mitre Corporation

The MITRE Corporation is a not-for-profit company that operates multiple federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs). They provide innovative, practical solutions for some of our nation's most critical challenges in defense and intelligence, aviation, civil systems, homeland security, the judiciary, healthcare, and cybersecurity.  They are also a member of the Santa Fe Institute's Applied Complexity Network (ACtioN).