Bashar Ourabi is a principle consultant at arabianconsult of Syria where he has been chairman since 2003. He holds Bsc. Eng., A Grad. Certificate in Project engineering from the University of Central Florida; and a MS. in Public Administration from the Doha Graduate Institute in Qatar.

Bashar completed his graduate studies at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and his undergraduate studies at the Unversity of Central Florida. His research interests lie in the area of systems modelling, ranging from theory to design to implementation. He has collaborated actively with researchers in several other disciplines of computer science, system design, and bigData Artificial Intellegence, particularly BigData Expert System and Automated decision Making.

He has served on many international posts overlooking public infrastructure design and operations, varying from public transport, urban design and operations management. These posts spanned over the the US and the Middle East including Florida, UAE and Qatar.

Bashar has served on many conferences and workshop program committees and has succesfully delivered many corporate training programs..

As a data scientist, I employ a variety of ecoinformatic tools to understand and improve the sustainability of complex social-ecological systems.  I also apply Science and Technology Studies lenses to my modeling processes in order to see potential ways to make social-ecological system management more just.  I prefer to work collaboratively with communities on modeling: teaching mapping and modeling skills, collaboratively building data representations and models, and analyzing and synthesizing community-held data as appropriate. At the same time, I look for ways to create space for qualitative and other forms of knowledge to reside alongside quantitative analysis, using mixed and integrative methods.

Recent projects include: 1) Studying Californian forest dynamics using Bayesian statistical models and object-based image analysis (datasets included forest inventories and historical aerial photographs); 2) Indigenous mapping and community-based modeling of agro-pastoral systems in rural Zimbabwe (methods included GPS/GIS, agent-based modeling and social network analysis); 3) Supporting Tribal science and environmental management on the Klamath River in California using historical aerial image analysis of land use/land cover change and social networks analysis of water quality management processes; 4) Bayesian statistical modeling of community-collected data on human uses of Marine Protected Areas in California.

Dr. Kimberly G. Rogers studies the coupled human-natural processes shaping coastal environments. She obtained a B.Sc. in Geological Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin and began her graduate studies on Long Island at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. Rogers completed her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University, where she specialized in nearshore and coastal sediment transport. She was a postdoctoral scholar and research associate at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder. In 2014, her foundation in the physical sciences was augmented by training in Environmental Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington through an NSF Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) Fellowship.

PhD student in economics

Ken Buetow is a human genetics and genomics researcher who leverages computational tools to understand complex traits such as cancer, liver disease, and obesity. He currently serves as director of Computational Sciences and Informatics program for Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University (CAS@ASU), is a professor in the School of Life Sciences in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; is a core faculty in the Center for Evolution and Medicine in the Biodesign Institute at ASU; and is director of bioinformatics and data management for the National Biomarker Development Alliance.

Professor Buetow previously served as the Founding Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology within the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute.

Klaus G. Troitzsch was a full professor of computer applications in the social sciences at the University of Koblenz-Landau since 1986 until he officially retired in 2012 (but continues his academic activities). He took his first degree as a political scientist. After eight years in active politics in Hamburg and after having taken his PhD, he returned to academia, first as a senior researcher in an election research project at the University of Koblenz-Landau, from 1986 as full professor of computer applications in the social sciences. His main interests in teaching and research are social science methodology and, especially, modelling and simulation in the social sciences.
Among his early research projects there is the MIMOSE project which developed a declarative functional simulation language and tool for micro and multilevel simulation between 1986 and 1992. Several EU funded projects were devoted to social simulation and policy modelling, the most recent from 2012 to 2015 combining data/text mining and agent-based simulation to analyse the global dynamics of extortion racket systems.
He authored, co-authored, and co-edited several books and many articles in social simulation, and he organised or co-organised a number of national and international conferences in this field. Over nearly three decades he advised and/or supervised more than 55 PhD theses, most of them in the field of social simulation. He offered annual summer and spring courses in social simulation between 1997 and 2009; more recent courses of this kind are now being organised by the European Social Simulation Assiciation and held at different places all over Europe (mostly with his contributions).