Former professor at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland and now senior researcher at CIRAD in France, I am doing research on artificial intelligence since 1984. Having begun with logic programming, I naturally applied logics and its extensions (i.e. modal logics of various sorts) to specify agent behaviour. Since 1987, I moved both to embedded intelligence (using mobile robots) and multi-agent systems applied, in particular, to job-shop scheduling and complex system simulation and design. Since 2001, I exclusively work on modelling and simulation of socio-ecosystems in a multidisciplinary team on renewable resources management (GREEN). I am focusing on modelling complex systems in a multi-disciplinary (economist, agronomist, sociologists, geographers, etc.) and multi-actor (stakeholders, decision makers) setting. It includes:
- representing multiple points of view at various scales and levels on a complex socio-ecosystem, using ontologies and contexts
- representing the dynamics of such systems in a variety of formalisms (differential equations, automata, rule-based systems, cognitive models, etc.)
- mapping these representations into a simulation formalism (an extension of DEVS) for running experiments and prospective analysis.
This research is instantiated within a modelling and simulation platform called MIMOSA (http://mimosa.sourceforge.net). The current applications are the assessment of the sustainability of management transfer to local communities of the renewable ressources and the dynamics of agro-biodidversity through networked exchanges.

Community and Infrastructure Resilience
Disaster Recovery
Complex Systems Modeling
Agent-Based Modeling
System Dynamics
Machine Learning
Pattern Recognition
Data Mining
Spatial Analysis and Modeling
Construction Management
Building Information Modeling

I have developed several agent-based and cellular automata applications combining agent-based modelling, geographical information systems and visualisation to understand the complex mechanisms of decision making in land use change and environmental stewardship in order to analyse:
• the role of pastoral agriculture in regional development,
• the tradeoffs between land use intensification and water quality,
• the adoption of land-based climate change mitigation practices, and
• the incorporation of cultural values into spatial futures or scenario modelling.

My research examines the most effective and efficient policies for renewable energy development using an approach that integrates input-output analysis, life cycle analysis, econometric, and agent-based modelling to estimate the impacts of the policies to economic, emission, extracted materials, renewable energy capacity and social acceptance.

I am currently head of the Working Group POLISES which uses agent-based models to study the impact of policies on land user behavior and consequences on the social-ecological system. This includes agri-environmental schemes for European agriculture and climate related policies such as insurance. In prior projects we investigated intended and unintended effects of global policy instruments on the social-ecological resilience of smallholders. We focused on the impact of policies targeting climate risk in common property regimes of pastoralists in Africa (Morocco and Kenya/Ethiopia).
On a conceptual level, I work in an international team of modellers, psychologists, agroeconomists and natural scientists on adequate representations of human behaviour in agent-based models. Furthermore, I am interested in how to describe models in an appropriate and standardised manner to increase their comprehensibility and comparison and how to foster model reuse and building up on each others work.