As a Research Fellow at SFI, DeDeo works on questions of computation in the natural world: how things that evolved – in contrast to things humans built – process information.
Drawing on his training in the mathematical sciences, he takes advantage of SFI’s transdisciplinary environment to investigate the emergence of collective phenomena in biological and social systems. In many cases, these allow groups to solve problems better than any of their individual parts.
At SFI, he combines methods developed to study, on the one hand, “unintelligent” physical phenomena, and on the other hand, engineered systems, to study evolved and adaptive phenomena in the living world. He works in collaboration with researchers in fields ranging from neuroscience to animal behavior to human social systems.