collective action
institutional emergence
evolution of institutions
community energy systems

I am a Professor in the School of Sustainability and the Director of the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment. I want to understand how people solve collective problems at different levels of scale, especially those problems related to sustainability of our environment. Our society experience unprecedented challenged to sustain common resource for future generations at a scale we have never experienced before. What makes groups cooperate? What is the role of information? How does the ecological context affect the social fabric? How do they deal with a changing environment? How can we use these insight to address global challenges? To do this research I combine behavioral experiments, agent-based modeling and case study analysis.

Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Security and Privacy, Smart Agriculture / Digital Agriculture, Health Computing, Digital Image Processing,
Social Networks Analysis, Sustainable Computing, Ecological Informatics, Smart Computing

Two themes unite my research: a commitment to methodological creativity and innovation as expressed in my work with computational social sciences, and an interest in the political economy of “globalization,” particularly its implications for the ontological claims of international relations theory.

I have demonstrated how the methods of computational social sciences can model bargaining and social choice problems for which traditional game theory has found only indeterminate and multiple equilibria. My June 2008 article in International Studies Quarterly (“Coordination in Large Numbers,” vol. 52, no. 2) illustrates that, contrary to the expectation of collective action theory, large groups may enjoy informational advantages that allow players with incomplete information to solve difficult three-choice coordination games. I extend this analysis in my 2009 paper at the International Studies Association annual convention, in which I apply ideas from evolutionary game theory to model learning processes among players faced with coordination and commitment problems. Currently I am extending this research to include social network theory as a means of modeling explicitly the patterns of interaction in large-n (i.e. greater than two) player coordination and cooperation games. I argue in my paper at the 2009 American Political Science Association annual convention that computational social science—the synthesis of agent-based modeling, social network analysis and evolutionary game theory—empowers scholars to analyze a broad range of previously indeterminate bargaining problems. I also argue this synthesis gives researchers purchase on two of the central debates in international political economy scholarship. By modeling explicitly processes of preference formation, computational social science moves beyond the rational actor model and endogenizes the processes of learning that constructivists have identified as essential to understanding change in the international system. This focus on the micro foundations of international political economy in turn allows researchers to understand how social structural features emerge and constrain actor choices. Computational social science thus allows IPE to formalize and generalize our understandings of mutual constitution and systemic change, an observation that explains the paradoxical interest of constructivists like Ian Lustick and Matthew Hoffmann in the formal methods of computational social science. Currently I am writing a manuscript that develops these ideas and applies them to several challenges of globalization: developing institutions to manage common pool resources; reforming capital adequacy standards for banks; and understanding cascading failures in global networks.

While computational social science increasingly informs my research, I have also contributed to debates about the epistemological claims of computational social science. My chapter with James N. Rosenau in Complexity in World Politics (ed. by Neil E. Harrison, SUNY Press 2006) argues that agent-based modeling suffers from underdeveloped and hidden epistemological and ontological commitments. On a more light-hearted note, my article in PS: Political Science and Politics (“Clocks, Not Dartboards,” vol. 39, no. 3, July 2006) discusses problems with pseudo-random number generators and illustrates how they can surprise unsuspecting teachers and researchers.

Linea de investigacion: Estrategias de modelamiento en Psicobiologia y Psicologia Social
/ Linea estrategica 1: bases biologicas de la cognicion social desde sistemas complejos

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.

Dissertation: Narrative Generation for Agent-Based Models

Abstract: This dissertation proposes a four-level framework for thinking about having agent-based models (ABM) generate narrative describing their behavior, and then provides examples of models that generate narrative at each of those levels. In addition, “interesting” agents are identified in order to direct the attention of researchers to the narratives most likely to be worth spending their time reviewing. The focus is on developing techniques for generating narrative based on agent actions and behavior, on techniques for generating narrative describing aggregate model behavior, and on techniques for identifying “interesting” agents. Examples of each of these techniques are provided in two different ABMs, Zero-Intelligence Traders (Gode & Sunder, 1993, 1997) and Sugarscape (Epstein & Axtell, 1996).

My research focuses on building a systemic understanding of coupled human-natural systems. In particular, I am interested in understanding how patterns of land-use and land-cover change emerge from human alterations of natural processes and the resulting feedbacks. Study systems of interest include those undergoing agricultural to urban conversion, typically known as urban sprawl, and those in which protective measures, such as wildfire suppression or flood/storm impact controls, can lead to long-term instability.

Dynamic agent- and process-based simulation models are my primary tools for studying human and natural systems, respectively. My past work includes the creation of dynamic, process-based simulation models of the wildland fires along the urban-wildland interface (UWI), and artificial dune construction to protect coastal development along a barrier island coastline. My current research involves the testing, refinement, extension of an economic agent-based model of coupled housing and land markets (CHALMS), and a new project developing a generalized agent-based model of land-use change to explore local human-environmental interactions globally.