I obtained my undergraduate degree in Mathematics at Worcester College, Oxford University. I then worked for 9 years for the UK government before returning to university to study for a MSc and PhD at UCL. On leaving UCL I started working in the insurance industry, where I develop models of cyber catastrophe events.

Paul Hart BSc (Liverpool), BA (Open University), PhD (Liverpool), MAE, FLS, FMBA. From 1973-1976 I worked on the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey at the Oceanographic Laboratory, Edinburgh. From 1973 – 1976 I was employed by Nordreco AB (a Nestlé R & D company) in Sweden as a fishery biologist where he advised the Findus group on fish raw material supplies and assessed the future potential of aquaculture. In 1976 I moved to the University of Leicester as a lecturer in aquatic biology. My research focused on the foraging behaviour of fish with a side interest in marine commercial fisheries. I retired as Professor and Head of the Department of Biology and am now an Emeritus Professor. I was a Trustee of the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, which ran the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey until it was merged with the Marine Biological Association: I then became a Trustee of the MBA. From 2010 – 2016 I was a member of the Science Advisory Board of Marine Scotland. I am co-author of Fisheries Ecology (1982) and co-editor of the two-volume Handbook of Fish Biology and Fisheries (2002). I was a co-editor of the journal Fish and Fisheries (Wiley) between 2000 and 2021.

1987-1989: assistant professor at the Neuchâtel University (Switzerland)
1990-2001: full professor at the Neuchâtel University (Switzerland): artificial intelligence & software engineering
2001- : senior researcher at CIRAD in the unit “Gestion des Ressources et Environnement” (GREEN) and from 2021 “Savoirs ENvironnement Sociétés” (UMR SENS)

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.

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.

I have been involved in agent-based modelling since the early nineties with a consistent attention to methdological improvement, institutional development and empirical issues. My mission is that ABM should be a routinely accepted research method (with a robust methodology) across the social sciences. To this end I have built diverse models and participated in research projects across economics, law, medicine, psychology, anthropology and sociology. I took a DPhil in economics on adaptive firm behaviour and then was involved in two research projects on money management and farmer decision making. Since 2006 I have worked at the Department of Sociology (now the School of Media, Communication and Sociology) at the University of Leicester. I was involved in the founding of JASSS and (more recently RofASSS https://rofasss.org) and have regularly served on the review panels for international conferences in the ABM community.