The latent simplicity of microbial ecological interactions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.30.741683v1

New preprint from our lab Statistical learning of bacterial growth in combinatorially constructed environments, led by brilliant PhD student Andrea Arrabal. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We systematically study nutrient-nutrient interactions in bacterial growth under carbon-limiting conditions.

New preprint on the limits of detecting higher-order interactions in microbial communities. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We find that the dominance of additive and pairwise interactions on community function may not reflect biological simplicity, but fundamental limits of statistical detection.

SFI's Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (@lhd.bsky.social) is the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG). Honoring “outstanding original contributions that use physical methods to develop a better understanding of socio-economic problems.”

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne receives Young Scientist Award

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) has been named the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG). ...

santafe.edu

Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model. This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine. 🧵/

X2Y@x2y.tech · 6mo ago

SAM ALTMAN: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

Glad this piece is out! I never understood why some literature went obsessed with hypergraphs per se when a lot had already been done (and yet ignored) for bipartite nets. What's interesting about higher-order interactions is...🥁...interactions – not how they are represented.

Tiago Peixoto@tiago.skewed.de · 6mo ago

New on the arxiv: “Graphs are maximally expressive for higher-order interactions” arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937 We clarify central misconceptions in the recent literature on "higher-order networks". w/ @piratepeel.bsky.social , @manlius.bsky.social, and @thilogross.bsky.social Explainer 🧵: 1/N

Here are your 10 -essential- AI prompts for academics ... make your life easy with help from @profserious.bsky.social profserious.substack.com/p/10-ai-prom...

10 AI Prompts for Academics

making those hard jobs a little easier ...

profserious.substack.com

Really happy to see this out in PRX Life! There you can find an eco-evolutionary framework integrating the evolution of viral infectiousness and antigenic features. While the former determines contagion events among hosts, the latter tells us how quickly viruses can escape population immunity 1/4👇

Excited about this paper and the interactive story to accompany it. Congrats @lhd.bsky.social @juniperlov.bsky.social @giulioburgio.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social @unioflimerick.bsky.social and nice story telling @jstonge.bsky.social!

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne@lhd.bsky.social · 11mo ago

The interactive story is by @jstonge.bsky.social and other friends: complex-stories.uvm.edu/friends-funn.... The paper is with friends from @vcsi.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social and @unioflimerick.bsky.social.

Very cool interactive story, @jstonge.bsky.social! "[...] real social cascades aren't simply branching processes with fixed rules." A self-reinforcing mechanism is what we propose in a recent piece led by the one and only @lhd.bsky.social.

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne@lhd.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Our Physical Review Letter looks at how to get power-law distributions of cascade size without tuning or self-organization to criticality by allowing cascades to improve in quality and jump over gaps or dead-ends TL;DR complex-stories.uvm.edu/friends-funn... Paper: journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

It might start as a joke, belief, or rumor, easy to dismiss. But then it twists, builds momentum, and spreads like wildfire. Why do some ideas die out while others go viral? A new study by researchers from the University of Vermont and the Santa Fe Institute offers answers: santafe.edu/news

Our team had an amazing week at @ic2s2.bsky.social in Norrköping Sweden and we will post pictures of our posters and talks soon - the big news is that we're so excited to host #IC2S2 in Burlington in 2026! youtu.be/p412S4GnPkc

IC2S2 2026 | Burlington, Vermont

YouTube video by UVM Office of Research

youtu.be

International Conference on Computational Social Science@ic2s2.bsky.social · last yr.

That’s a wrap on IC2S2’25! 🎉 Thank you for an unforgettable week of ideas and discussions. Congratulations to our award winners, and safe travels home. Mark your calendars: #ic2s2 ’ 26 heads to Burlington, Vermont, in the US. See you next year!

There's amazing work on group effects in higher-order networks, but not a lot of connections to social ontology, collective action, and group selection. Led by @jstonge.bsky.social with expert guidance of @rharp.bsky.social we reviewed and formalized these connections. arxiv.org/abs/2507.02758

Defining and classifying models of groups: The social ontology of higher-order networks

In complex systems research, the study of higher-order interactions has exploded in recent years. Researchers have formalized various types of group interactions, such as public goods games, biologica...

arxiv.org

Defining and classifying models of groups: The social ontology of higher-order networks arxiv.org/abs/2507.02758

Defining and classifying models of groups: The social ontology of higher-order networks

In complex systems research, the study of higher-order interactions has exploded in recent years. Researchers have formalized various types of group interactions, such as public goods games, biologica...

arxiv.org

Not sure we'll ever understand adaptive systems enough. But what we're sure of is that one basic reason is that you can't even start to describe them properly w/o preserving local dynamical correlations. A fun and frustrating long way to go. w/ the amazing @lhd.bsky.social & @gstonge.bsky.social.

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne@lhd.bsky.social · last yr.

New work led by the great @giulioburgio.bsky.social. A detailed math model to track correlations within and across groups in higher-order networks. We also get to study adaptive hypergraphs, which self-organize as sparse or dense graphs to control a contagion. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

During a pandemic such as COVID19, we hope (but fail) to accurately estimate the incidence of the disease. In this paper, we propose a new approach to machine-learn models of the real incidence from readily available information (tests and detected cases) dx.doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Some decisions are best made quickly and locally. Governance can work better as a higher-order network, not a pyramid around a central state. How should we design these networks? We looked at this with law and complexity scholars and found "effective governance" networks. arxiv.org/abs/2412.03421

We are thrilled to share our new pre-print, “Self-Reinforcing Cascades: A Spreading Model for Beliefs or Products of Varying Intensity or Quality,” now available on arXiv! arxiv.org/pdf/2411.00714