James Evans is Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology, Director of Knowledge Lab, and the Computational Social Science program at the University of Chicago and the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement, accumulation of certainty, and the charatercter of human understanding. He is especially interested in innovation–how new ideas and technologies emerge–and the role that social and technical institutions (e.g., the Internet, markets, collaborations) play in collective cognition and discovery. Much of his work has focused on areas of modern science and technology, but he is also interested in public and privation communication of information and misinformation. He supports the creation of novel observatories for human understanding and action through crowd-sourcing, information extraction from text and images, and the use of distributed sensors. He uses machine learning, generative modeling, social and semantic network representations to explore knowledge processes, scale up interpretive and field-methods, and create alternatives to current discovery regimes. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, Facebook, IBM, the Sloan Foundation, Jump! Trading and other sources, and has been published in Science, Nature, PNAS, and top social and computer science outlets. His work has been featured widely in the popular press.