Research fellow at the Agricultural Economics and Policy Group at ETH Zurich.
Behavioural ecology and modelling of ant behaviour, with an emphasis on understanding how individual-level complexity affects collective decision-making
Interested in how technology innovation impacts people’s lives.
I studied Mathematics at Oxford (1979-1983) then did youth work in inner city areas for the Educational Charity. After teaching in Grenada in the West Indies we came back to the UK, where the first job I could get was in a 6th form college (ages 16-18). They sent me to do post16 PCGE, which was so boring that I also started a part-time PhD. The PhD was started in 1992 and was on the meaning and definition of the idea of “complexity”, which I had been pondering for a few years. Given the growth of the field of complexity from that time, I had great fun reading almost anything in the library but I did finally finish it in 1999. Fortunately I got a job at the Centre for Policy Modelling (CfPM) in 1994 with its founder and direction, Scott Moss. We were doing agent-based social simulation then, but did not know it was called this and did not meet other such simulators for a few years. With Scott Moss we built the CfPM into one of the leading research centres in agent-based social simulation in the world. I became director of the CfPM just before Scott retired, and later became Professor of Social Simulation in 2013. For more about me see http://bruce.edmonds.name or http://cfpm.org.
All aspects of social simulation including: techniques, tools, applications, philosophy, methodology and interesting examples. Understanding complex social systems. Context-dependency and how it affects interaction and cognition. Complexity and how this impacts upon simulation modelling. Social aspects of cognition - or to put it another way - the social embedding of intelligence. Simulating how science works. Integrating qualitative evidence better into ABMs. And everything else.
Agent-based computing in economics and finance
Large-scale agent-based models
Agent models calibrated by micro-data
Complex adaptive systems
Mathematical analysis of agent systems
Simulation games, systemic complexity, learning, business cycles, and discrete-event simulation, modeling sustainability challenges in urban context.
Eric is a Research Fellow in the Complexity programme at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Unit at the University of Glasgow, working on agent-based simulation approaches to complex public health issues. Prior to this he was a Research Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Systems in the School of Computing at Teesside University. Before working at Teesside, he worked on the CLC Project at the University of Southampton, a multidisciplinary project which focuses on the application of complexity science approaches to the social science domain.
Eric received a BA with Honours in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University, and a PhD from the School of Computing at the University of Leeds. After his PhD, he worked as a JSPS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo, conducting research in computer simulation and robotics.