Santa Fe Institute

Bio

Jessica Flack is the Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

The goal of Flack’s research program is to provide an account of the emergence of multi-scale, hierarchical structure in biological and social systems. Results from her studies suggest that robust social aggregates emerge from interactions among self-interested components through a process of collective social computation, whereby components jointly construct social structure with slowly changing, persistent features to minimize uncertainty. This work has involved development of novel techniques for extracting strategic decision-making rules from time-series data and constructing the causal networks or social circuits that map microscopic dynamics to macroscopic states. Central themes of Flack’s projects include computation in nature, endogenous coarse-graining, collective cognition and behavior, multiple time-scales, conflict dynamics and control, robustness, and the role of information and communication in biology and social evolution. Flack approaches these issues using data on social process collected from animal society model systems, data collected from behavioral knockout experiments on social systems, and through comparison of social dynamics with neural, immune, and developmental dynamics. Flack, with two colleagues, is writing a book on robustness, causal networks, and experimental design that will be published by Princeton University Press.