Simon DeDeo

Associate Professor
Ph.D. in Astrophysics

Bio

Simon DeDeo is an associate professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He was previously affiliated with Complex Systems and the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University.

Education

Ph.D.: Astrophysics, Princeton University
MA: Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University
AB: Astrophysics, Harvard University

He has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo and at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.

Research

At the Laboratory for Social Minds we undertake empirical investigations, and build mathematical theories, of both historical and contemporary phenomena. We range from the centuries-long timescales of cultural evolution to the second-by-second emergence of social hierarchy in the non-human animals, from the editors of Wikipedia to the French Revolution to the gas stations of Indiana. We create synthetic, deep-time accounts of major transitions in political order, with the goal of the predicting and understanding our species’ future. You can learn more about his research at his lab website.

Publications

Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions
Simon DeDeo

Major Transitions in Political Order
Simon DeDeo

The Evolution of Wikipedia’s Norm Network
Bradi Heaberlin, Simon DeDeo

Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in Darwin's Reading Notebooks
Jaimie Murdock, Colin Allen, Simon DeDeo

Social feedback and the emergence of rank in animal society
Elizabeth Hobson, Simon DeDeo

The evolution of lossy compression
Sarah Marzen, Simon DeDeo