agriculture & food systems | resilience & transformation & equity

Topics:

Behavioural aspects of environmental problems: Use of evolutionary approaches to investigate how people react to environmental policy.
Resource scarcity
Climate-economic Models: Understand how economic agents think and decide about climate change and climate protection
Sustainable Development

Methods:

Agent-Based-Modeling
Genetic algorithms
Evolutionary economics
Behavioural economics
Ecological economics
Complexity Theory

Three fields interest me in research: the study of market from a behavioral point of view, focusing on loyalty, trust, quality convention; then the study of institutions, their dynamics and the predictions/diagnostics that can be made following Ostrom’s IAD framework; eventually discussions on epistemology and validation about ABM.

Evolution of social behavior and complex systems

ABM applied to natural resources and reputation/colaboration.

Community assembly after intervention by coral transplantation

The potential of transplantation of scleractinian corals in restoring degraded reefs has been widely recognized. Levels of success of coral transplantation have been highly variable due to variable environmental conditions and interactions with other reef organisms. The community structure of the area being restored is an emergent outcome of the interaction of its components as well as of processes at the local level. Understanding the
coral reef as a complex adaptive system is essential in understanding how patterns emerge from processes at local scales. Data from a coral transplantation experiment will be used to develop an individual-based model of coral community development. The objectives of the model are to develop an understanding of assembly rules, predict trajectories and discover unknown properties in the development of coral reef communities in the context of reef restoration. Simulation experiments will be conducted to derive insights on community trajectories under different disturbance regimes as well as initial transplantation configurations. The model may also serve as a decision-support tool for reef restoration.

My profound interest in networks convinced me to work in these subjects and start my master project on an application of social network analysis for detecting organized fraud in Automobile insurance, which helps to flag groups of fraudsters. The key point of this project is simply to find fraudulent rings, while the most of traditional methods have only taken opportunistic fraud into consideration. My duty in research is to design an algorithm for identifying cyclic components, then to be compared with theoretical ones. This project showed me how networks are used in the analysis of relations.