Jacob G Foster

Timeline

1. 2003–2010

   Physics from Duke to Calgary

   He trains as a physicist, starting with a BS from Duke University in 2003, and studies mathematical physics at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship from 2003 to 2006. After attending the Santa Fe Institute's Complex Systems Summer School in 2008, he completes a PhD in statistical physics and complex systems in the University of Calgary's Complexity Science Group in 2010.

2. 2010–2013

   Sociology at the University of Chicago

   From 2010 to 2013, he retrains as a social scientist in the University of Chicago's Department of Sociology, working as a postdoctoral scholar and research assistant professor.

3. 2013–2023

   Professor of sociology at UCLA

   He serves on the UCLA faculty from 2013 to 2023, becoming Professor of Sociology. His work there uses machine learning to mine the cultural meanings buried in text and methods from macro-evolution to study the dynamics of cultural populations.

4. 2015

   Tradition and innovation in science

   In 2015, with Andrey Rzhetsky and James Evans, he publishes “Tradition and Innovation in Scientists' Research Strategies” in the American Sociological Review. The study represents biomedical chemistry as evolving knowledge networks and finds that most scientists choose conservative strategies, which makes collective discovery slower and more expensive.

5. 2018

   The Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute

   In July 2018, he and Erica Cartmill direct the new Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. As its founding co-director, he builds a program for early-career scholars who study mind, cognition and intelligence in forms from ants and apes to humans and AI.

6. 2020–2021

   Infosys Member at the IAS

   From 2020 to 2021, he is an Infosys Member at the Institute for Advanced Study.

7. 2021

   A NeurIPS datasets award

   With Bernard Koch, Emily Denton and Alex Hanna, he coauthors “Reduced, Reused and Recycled: The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning Research,” which wins a Datasets and Benchmarks Award at NeurIPS 2021. The paper tracks dataset use across machine learning subcommunities from 2015 to 2020 and finds growing concentration on fewer datasets, many introduced by researchers at a small number of elite institutions.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor at Indiana University

   After his UCLA years end in 2023, he is a Professor of Informatics and Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research seeks the principles behind natural and artificial intelligences, individual and collective. With Erica Cartmill, he directs the new Center for Possible Minds at Indiana University.