Complexity Explorer Santa Few Institute

Program co-Director Chris Kempes is a resident faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. His work focuses on developing general perspectives of life that can be applied in contexts ranging from modern ecology, to astrobiology, to human institutions. Kempes is one of the creators of the Complexity Explorer Origins of Life course, which explores the question of how life emerged from an abiotic world.

Program co-Director Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems. Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her online course “Introduction to Complexity” has been taken by over 25,000 students, and is one of Course Central’s “top fifty online courses of all time”.