Complexity Explorer Santa Few Institute

April Showers of Complexity

14 Apr 2017

New session of Introduction to Complexity now open

Time to head over to the Introduction to Complexity MOOC if you haven't already.  The course is now live with over 1600 students enrolled. This course is perfect to give you an exciting overview of what Complexity is, and to prepare you to launch into our many other courses and tutorials.  It's free, and you can start any time, but if you want a certificate you will need to complete by the end of June. 

If you're interested in the Introduction to Agent-based Modeling course, you're in luck! Enrollment will open for this course on May 5th and the course will launch June 5th.  Bill Rand will once more guide a group of motivated students through the ins and outs of using Agent-based Modeling to study all manner of questions of interest to them.  Interested in joining the course? Get excited by reading about a few of last year's student projects here.  Bill will be updating many of the later videos of the course to improve it, but you can get a glimpse of what will be offered by looking at the archived version of the course.  The first unit of the course will be open and free to everyone; if you want to participate in the rest of the session, design and build a project, and earn a certificate a minimum tuition payment of $50 USD is requested.  There will be a minimum of 100 scholarships made available to deserving students. If you loved this course last year and know someone who you think should take it, spend the next month convincing them to enroll!

Renormalization Tutorial Now Available

We are proud to welcome back Simon DeDeo with a brand new tutorial, Introduction to Renormalization.  Simon crafted a new vision  for how the subject should be taught, and we encourage you to dive into this essential and fascinating tutorial right away.  This tutorial surveys algorithm compression techniques and their uses. While typically renormalization is reserved for statistical physics, Prof. DeDeo applies the techniques to information formatting, complex scaling problems and human decision making scenarios. Read an interview with Simon on our site talking a bit more about his tutorial and how it intersects with his own research.  

Justin Grana's new tutorial on Game Theory: Static Games has over 400 students enrolled.  We've been paying close attention to feedback and have updated a couple of videos that were a little confusing.  Your feedback is always appreciated!  Here in Santa Fe, Justin's tutorial has gathered some local interest - read one journalist's take here in this Santa Fe New Mexican article.  

Subtitle Progress

This month in subtitling team news, Cigdem Yalcin has achieved over 120 minutes’ worth of video subtitles with an incredible 55 minutes in March. For her awesome work she’ll receive a piece of Complexity Explorer merchandise, and keep your eyes peeled for a news item about her coming soon. 

March’s scoreboard also shows great work by power subtitler Diego Diaz with 18 minutes and newcomer Seonaid has put up 67 minutes in the last two months. Users Carlos Hidalgo and Makhanov Alexey are both less than 20 minutes away from earning Power Subtitler status and a t-shirt. The race is on to see who will win merch in April!

Great work everyone - our subtitling team is a key element of keeping Complexity Explorer accessible to all and improving our learning platform overall. 

Our next subtitle challenge for all of you language enthusiasts is to help us create subtitles for the Introduction to Agent-based Modeling course. Focus on subtitling the first half of the course - the second half is likely to change for this upcoming second session. Help us by joining our subtitle team today.   

Donation Progress and 2017 Goals

As part of our regular updates this year we will be letting you know our fundraising status and goals for 2017 as we progress through the year.  We are hoping to raise $30,000 in donations during 2017.  This is the amount we have calculated it costs to re-offer our free courses and tutorials in 2017. As of April 4 2017 we have raised $3,937 in donations. If you would like to help us reach our goal and help sustain Complexity Explorer in the future, please consider donating any amount you can today.  Thank you for helping to keep this project alive!


Comment on this article:

You must be logged in to comment

Comments

← Back to news stories