Ifigeneia Koutiva (female) is a senior environmental engineer, holding a PhD in Civil Engineering (NTUA), a Postgrad Diploma in Water Resources and Environmental Management (Un. of Belgrade - e-learning), an MSc in Environmental Technology (Imperial College London) and an MSc in Mining and Metallurgy Engineering (NTUA). Her PhD was funded by the Greek Ministry of Education through Heracleitous II scholarship. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar of the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) for 2020 - 2021. She has 10 years of experience in various EU funded research projects, both as a researcher and as a project manager, in the fields of socio-technical simulation, urban water modelling, modelling and assessment of alternative water technologies, artificial intelligence, social quantitative research, KPI and water indicators development and assessment and analysis of large data sets. She is very competent with programming for creating ICT tools for agent based modelling and data analysis tools and she is an experienced user of spatial analysis software and tools. She is also actively involved in the design and implementation of numerous consultation workshops and conferences. She has authored more than 20 scientific journal articles, conferences articles and research reports.

Anna Sikora is an Associate Professor in the Computer Architecture and Operating System Department at Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).

She got the BS degree in computer science in 1999 from Technical University of Wroclaw (Poland). She got the MSc in computer science in 2001 and in 2004 the PhD in computer science, both from Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain).

Since 1999 her investigation is related to parallel and distributed computing. Her current main interests are focused on high performance parallel applications, performance models, automatic performance analysis and dynamic tuning. She has been involved in programming tools for automatic and dynamic performance tuning on cluster and Grid environments, as well as in exa-scale systems.

I am an agent-based modeller at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland. I specialise in large-scale modelling of social and socio-ecological systems, with a particular focus on simulating stressors and process that could give rise to transformational change. To date, my research has focused on food and agricultural systems, rural economies, and the WASH sector, with much of it informed by firsthand fieldwork in Africa, Asia, and Europe. I am also interested in leveraging open science, participatory research, quantitative ethnography, and grounded theory within modelling processes to collaboratively generate nuanced insights into individual behaviour and societal dynamics. I received the Open Science Award from the International Land Use Study Centre in 2023 for such work. I currently co-lead the European Social Simulation Association’s Special Interest Group on Modelling Transformative Change and I am the Associate Director of the Centre for Empirical Agent-Based Modelling at the James Hutton Institute.

In my research I focus on understanding human behaviour in group(s) as a part of a complex (social) system. My research can be characterised by the overall question: ‘How does group or collective behaviour arise or change given its social and physical context?‘ More specifically, I have engaged with: ‘How is (individual) human behaviour affected by being in a crowd?’, ‘Why do some groups (cooperatively) use their resources sustainably, whereas others do not?‘, ‘What is the role of (often implicit simplistic) assumptions regarding human behaviour for science and/or management?’

To address these questions, I use computational simulations to integrate and reflect synthesised knowledge from literature, empirics and experts. Models, simulation and data analysis are my tools for gaining a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying such systems. More specifically, I work with agent-based modelling (ABM), simulation experiments and data analysis of large datasets. Apart from crowd modelling and social-ecological modelling, I also develop methodological tools to analyse social simulation data and combining ABM with other methods, such as behavioural experiments.