We reshape human-environment modeling to identify critical leverage points for sustainability transitions.

Cooperation at scale – in which large collectives of intelligent actors in complex environments seek ways to improve their joint well-being – is critical for a sustainable future, yet unresolved.

To move forward with this challenge, we develop a mathematical framework of collective learning, bridging ideas from complex systems science, multi-agent reinforcement learning, and social-ecological resilience.

My core research interest is to understand how humans and other living creature perceive and behave; respond and act upon their environment and how this dynamic interplay shapes us into who we are. In recognition of the broad scope of this question I am a strong believer in the need for inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches and have worked at research groups in a wide range of departments and institutions, including university departments of Physics as well as Psychology, a bio-medical research lab, a robotics research laboratory and most recently the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. Though my work has primarily taken the form of computational neuroscience I have also performed psychophysical experiments with healthy human subjects, been involved in neural imaging experiments and contributed towards the development of a humanoid robot.

Based on the philosophy of ‘understanding through creating’ I believe that bio-mimetic and biologically inspired computational and robotic engineering can teach us not only how to build more flexible and robust tools but also how actual living creatures deal with their environment. I am therefore a strong believer in the fertile information exchange between scientific as well as engineering research disciplines.

I conduct long-term behavioral and ecological field research on several species in the primate community of Amazonian Ecuador to investigate the ways in which ecological conditions (such as the abundance and distribution of food resources) and the strategies of conspecifics together shape primate behavior and social relationships and ultimately determine the kinds of societies we see primates living in. This is a crucial and central focus in evolutionary anthropology, as understanding the ways in which behavior and social systems are shaped by environmental pressures is a fundamental part of the discipline.

I complement my field studies with molecular genetic laboratory work and agent-based simulation modeling in order to address issues that are typically difficult to explore through observational studies alone, including questions about dispersal behavior, gene flow, mating patterns, population structure, and the fitness consequences of individual behavior. In collaboration with colleagues, I have also started using molecular techniques to investigate a number of broader questions concerning the evolutionary history, social systems, and ecological roles of various New World primates.

Research activities range between Computer Science, Information Systems and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Agent-based modeling/simulation (ABM), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Geographical Information Science (GIScience).

Development Economics, Environmental Economics, Sustainability, Environment, Climate change, Climate justice, Energy, Clean Energy, Renewable Energy, Complex systems

I have developed several agent-based and cellular automata applications combining agent-based modelling, geographical information systems and visualisation to understand the complex mechanisms of decision making in land use change and environmental stewardship in order to analyse:
• the role of pastoral agriculture in regional development,
• the tradeoffs between land use intensification and water quality,
• the adoption of land-based climate change mitigation practices, and
• the incorporation of cultural values into spatial futures or scenario modelling.

Water scarcity generated by climate change and mismanagement, affects individual at microlevel and the society and the system at a more general level. The research focuses on irrigation system and their robustness and adaptation capacity to uncertainty. In particular it investigates the evolution of farmers interactions and the effectiveness of policies by means of dynamic game theory and incorporate the results into an Agent Based Model to explore farmers emergent behaviors and the role of an agency in defining policies. Early knowledge of individual decision makers could help the agency to design more acceptable solutions.

Jorge is a PhD candidate of System Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research activities are focused on applying agent-based models on three major areas: 1) financial markets to study the self-regulation capability of artificial markets with interacting investors and credit rating agencies; 2) the efficiency of road networks when users have access to real-time information and are able to adjust their behavior to current conditions; 3) failure probability of nuclear waste containers due to microbial- and chemical-driven corrosion.

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.

Complex Systems
Agent-based Models
System Dynamics
Innovation
Economics
Organizational Development