I am Colombian with passion for social impact. I believe that change starts at the individual, community, local and then global level. I have set my goal in making a better experience to whatever challenges I encounter and monetary systems and governance models is what concerns me at the time.

In my path to understanding and reflecting about these issues I have found my way through “Reflexive Modeling”. Models are just limited abstractions of reality and is part of our job as researchers to dig in the stories behind our models and learn to engage in a dialogue between both worlds.

Antônio Sousa is a biologist with a background in medical entomology, disease ecology, statistical and computational modeling. Antônio has a Ph.D. (2018) and Master (2014) in Science from the School of Public Health at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow in the same institution.

Sedar is a PhD student at the University of Leeds, department of Geography. He graduated in Computer Science at King’s College London 2018. From a very early stage of his degree, he focused on artificial intelligence planning implementations on drones in a search and rescue domain, and this was his first formal attempt to study artificial intelligence. He participated in summer school at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul working on programming techniques to reduce execution time. During his final year, he concentrated on how argumentation theory with natural language processing can be used to optimise political influence. In the midst of completing his degree, he applied to Professor Alison Heppenstall’s research proposal focusing on data analytics and society, a joint endeavour with the Alan Turing Institute and the Economic and Social Research Council. From 2018 - 2023 he will be working on his PhD at the Alan Turing Institute and Leeds Institute for Data Analytics.

After completing my undergraduate education at Bilkent University (Turkey), I continued my studies at the University of Cambridge, receiving first my MPhil and then my PhD in Assyriology/Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, funded by a Chevening Open Society Scholarship and the Board of Higher Education of Turkey. After teaching for several years at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, I moved to eastern Turkey to start the Archaeology Department of Bitlis Eren University, and I was the Head of Department until the end of 2018. I have been a visiting researcher at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman in 2011 (Mellink Fellowship), at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 2014 (Fulbright Fellowship), and at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History of Uppsala University in 2019 (Swedish Institute Fellowship). I have also held a Newton Advanced Fellowship here at Leicester in the UK. I have previously co-directed several fieldwork projects: the Cambridge University Kilise Tepe Excavations (southern Turkey, 2009-13), the Cide Archaeological Project (survey, Black Sea coast, 2010-1), the Sirwan Regional Project (survey, northern Iraq, 2012-5), and the Lower Göksu Archaeological Salvage Survey Project (survey, southern Turkey, 2013-7). I am currently co-directing the Çadır Höyük excavations, which is a joint American, British, Canadian and Turkish archaeological excavation project conducted in north-central Turkey, and the Taşeli-Karaman Archeological Project, which was initiated in 2018 as a continuation of the Lower Göksu Archaeological Salvage Survey Project, to study the Göksu River Basin in its wider geographical context in the hope of better understanding its role as a network hub connecting the eastern Mediterranean world to the central Anatolian Plateau.

Peter Gerbrands is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the of Utrecht University School of Economics, where is develops the data infrastructure for FIRMBACKBONE. He teaches data science courses: “Applied Data Analysis and Visualization” and “Introduction to R”. His research interests are agent-based simulations, social network analysis, complex systems, big data analysis, statistical learning, and computational social science. He applies his skills primarily for policy analysis, especially related to illicit financial flows, i.e. tax evasion, tax avoidance and money laundering and has published in Regulation & Governance, and EPJ Data Science. Prior to becoming an academic, Peter had a long career in IT consulting. In Fall 2023, he is a Visiting Research Scholar at SUNY Binghamton in NY.

I’m a Research Associate in Computational Social Science at Durham University working on a project that intends to produce more realistic artificial social networks (RASN) for simulation by creating a taxonomy of existing generator papers, accessible as an interactive, open-access database, in addition to exploring the interdependencies of social network’s structural properties. I obtained my PhD from University of Glasgow in (2023) where I was working on modelling national identity polarisation on social media platforms using ABMs.

Prof. Christian E. Vincenot is by nature an interdisciplinary researcher with broad scientific interests. He majored in Computer Science / Embedded Systems (i.e. IoT) at the Université Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, France) while working professionally in the field of Computer Networking and Security. He then switched the focus of his work towards Computational Modelling, writing his doctoral dissertation on Hybrid Modelling in Ecology, and was awarded a PhD in Social Informatics by Kyoto University in 2011 under a scholarship by the Japanese Ministry of Research. He subsequently started a parallel line of research in Conservation Biology (esp. human-bat conflicts) under a postdoctoral fellowship of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (2012-2014). This led him to create the Island Bat Research Group (www.batresearch.net), which he is still coordinating to this date. In 2014, he was appointed as the tenured Assistant Professor of the Biosphere Informatics Laboratory at Kyoto University. He also been occupying editorial roles for the journals PLOS ONE, Frontiers in Environmental Science, and Biology. In 2020, he created Ariana Technologies (www.ariana-tech.com), a start-up operating in the field of Data Science/Simulation and IoT for crisis management.