- 02 Dec 2016
Give back in December and help us earn our $4000 promised match
As 2016 closes, we want to thank all of our supporters who have contributed with donations, tuition, or buying t-shirts. Thank you as well to those who donated their time creating subtitles for our courses. Thanks also to everyone who shared course information with their network, or left reviews of our courses, helping to get the word out. 2017 is going to be a very interesting year for Complexity Explorer. We have some completely new projects in the works that we can't talk about yet, but promise to be very exciting. 2017 is also the last year of our grant funding, and in order to continue to offer our resources to you in 2018 and beyond, we need your help.
Read about past supporters of Complexity Explorer here.
So far in 2016 we have raised $30,000 in donations, tuition and t-shirt sales. Are you one of our supporters? Thank you! The impact of these gifts will be especially felt in 2018. We will keep working on setting up various funding streams to ensure that Complexity Explorer can continue offering you courses and resources, however some of these may not yield fruit until well into 2018. It is crucial, therefore, for us to raise funds now and in 2017 to help us operate in 2018. It takes $200,000 a year to run the Complexity Explorer program.
This December, we urge you to consider making a donation to Complexity Explorer. For the month of December, our anonymous supporter is back and has once again pledged to match any donation received up to $4,000. Last year we raised $11,000 in December and surpassed our matching goal of $8,000. With your help we can do even better! Also, this year, we are going to raffle off 5 t-shirts or tote bags. Every donor will go into the raffle for a chance to receive a Complexity Explorer t-shirt or tote bag mailed to them anywhere in the world. We will announce the winners and contact them in January 2017.
In December, your donations will be matched dollar for dollar up to $4,000 by an anonymous supporter! Donate now to help us reach our goal.
Course Schedule 2017
We have confirmed dates for three of our MOOCs in 2017 so far - Fractals and Scaling in February, Introduction to Agent-based Modeling in June, and Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos in August. We are hoping to offer two new courses, Complexity Economics with Doyne Farmer and David Pugh, and Information Dynamics of Complex Networks with Hector Zenil and Narsis Kiani, though the dates for those have not been confirmed.
Stories from Agent-based Modeling
One of the highlights of 2017 was launching our long-awaited Introduction to Agent-based Modeling course with William Rand. The first session of this course has now closed and was a great success! You can access all of the course videos and quizzes for free under the Archived Courses section. The highlight of this course for many students was the ability to create a model from scratch based on a subject of their choosing. The projects were then reviewed by their peers. We are collecting feedback and stories from the course and will publish an article on it soon, in the meantime, get inspired by student Kalai Ramea's model below and think about enrolling in June 2017!
Kalai Ramea, located in the USA, investigated how consumers choose different vehicle technologies (gasoline, electric and fuel cell vehicles), based on the vehicles’ attributes, driving behavior and infrastructure availability. She is an early career researcher who just finished her PhD in mathematical modeling of energy and transportation systems. With this course under her belt, she hopes to identify how infrastructure and vehicle purchase behavior interact in a GIS framework in an ABM for different neighborhoods around the world. You can check out Kalai's model in the Agent-based Modeling Commons here.
Searching for Star Subtitlers to take on two courses
We have just added the videos from Dave Feldman's Fractals and Scaling course, as well as Bill Rand's videos from the Introduction to Agent-based Modeling course, to the Amara subtitle team. Dave Feldman's course is starting in February - our challenge to you is to help us create English captions for the whole course by then! Of course you are welcome to translate to any language as well, and if agent-based modeling is more your style, we hope you can help us caption that course by June 2017. Remember, 120 minutes of completed subtitles gets you a free t-shirt mailed to you anywhere in the world, or a voucher for a future paid course. Find out more about how to join here.
Keep up to date with SFI's Research
The Santa Fe Institute's News Center features summaries of research from SFI resident and external faculty and postdoctoral researchers. It's worth checking in and reading up on the current research. For example, a recent paper co-authored by SFI's Cris Moore and published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science introduces a better recommendation algorithm that could be useful, for instance, in online dating or movie recommendations. Read about it on SFI's page here.
