Dr. Lilian Alessa, University of Idaho President’s Professor of Resilient Landscapes in the Landscape Architecture program, is also Co-Director of the University of Idaho Center for Resilient Communities. She conducts extensive research on human adaptation to environmental change through resilient design at landscape scales. Much of her work is funded by the National Science Foundation, including projects awarded the Arctic Observing Network, Intersections of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS) and the Dynamics of Coupled Natural Human Systems programs. Canadian-born and raised, Alessa received her degrees from the University of British Columbia. She also uses her expertise in social-ecological and technological systems science to develop ways to improve domestic resource security for community well-being, particularly through the incorporation of place-based knowledge. Her work through the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence, the Arctic Domain Awareness Center, involves developing social-technological methods to monitor and respond to critical environmental changes. Lil is a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education and is on the Science, Technology and Education Advisory Committee for the National Ecological Observing Network (NEON). Professor Alessa also teaches a university landscape architecture capstone course: Resilient Landscapes with Professor Andrew Kliskey. Professor Alessa’s collaborative grant activity with Professor Andrew Kliskey, since coming to the university in 2013, exceeds 7 million USD to date. She has authored over a 100 publications and reports and has led the development of 2 federal climate resilience toolbox assessments, the Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability Index (AWRVI) and the Arctic Adaptation Exchange Portal (AAEP).

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.

Doctor and Magister in Informatics by the Girona University (Spain), Telematics Engineer and Systems Technologist by the Francisco José de Caldas University (Bogotá, Colombia), Specialist in Databases Management, and Specialist in Higher Education. Currently, associate professor and researcher at the Fundación Universitaria Konrad Lorenz (Bogotá, Colombia). Academic leader of the Konrad IA project (IA - Artificial Intelligence). Associated researcher by the science and technology Colombian ministry.

CoMSES.Net is a good community space to share knowledge regarding agent based and computational models that are built based upon a wide variety of contexts (social, political, educational, scientific, biological, etc.). Thus, the CoMSES.Net should be known in all regions around the world. Moreover, as I belong to the Spanish-speaking community, it would be very interesting to publicize what the network does in Spanish-speaking countries.

My research uses modeling to understand complex coupled human and natural systems, and can be generally described as computational social science. I am especially interested in modeling water management systems, in both archaeological and contemporary contexts. I have previously developed a framework for modeling general archaeological complex systems, and applied this to the specific case of the Hohokam in southern Arizona. I am currently engaged in research in data mining to understand contemporary water management strategies in the U.S. southwest and in several locations in Alaska. I am also a developer for the Repast HPC toolkit, an agent-based modeling toolkit specifically for high-performance computing platforms, and maintain an interest in the philosophy of science underlying our use of models as a means to approach complex systems. I am currently serving as Communications Officer for the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas.

I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior department at the University of Minnesota. My research involves using agent-based models combined with lab and field research to test a broad range of hypotheses in biology. I am currently developing an agent-based model of animal cell systems to investigate the epigenetic mechanisms that influence cell behavior. For my PhD work, I created a model, B3GET, which simulates the evolution of virtual primates to better understand the relationships between growth and development, life history and reproductive strategies, mating strategies, foraging strategies, and how ecological factors drive these relationships. I have also conducted fieldwork to inform the modeled behavior of these virtual organisms. Here I am pictured with an adult male gelada in Ethiopia!

**PROFESSIONS **

Associate Professor
School of Management Science and Engineering, Shandong Technology and Business University (Yantai 264005, P. R. China)

**EDUCATION BACKGROUDS **

Ph. D. Degree, 09/2009 – 07/2015
School of Economics and Management, Beihang University (P. R. China)

M. A. Degree, 09/2003 – 02/2006
The Institute of Systems Engineering, Dalian University of Technology (P. R. China)

B. A. Degree, 09/1999 – 07/2003
Department of Information and Control Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (P. R. China)

**VISITING & SUMMER SCHOOLS **

Visiting Scholar at GECS – Research Group of Experimental and Computational Sociology (March, 2017 – February, 2018)
 Università degli Studi di Brescia (Italy)
 Co-supervisor: Professor Flaminio Squazzoni

Summer school in ‘Agent-based modeling for social scientists’ (September 4-8, 2017)
 University of Brescia, Italy
 Instructors: Flaminio Squazzoni, Simone Gabbriellini, Nicolas Payette, Federico Bianchi

The Santa Fe Institute’s Massive Open Online Course: Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling (Jun 5 – September 8, 2017)
 The Santa Fe Institute, Complexity Explore Web: abm.complexityexploer.org
 Instructors: Bill Rand

Summer school in ‘Complex systems and management’ (July 2-12, 2012)
 National Defense University, P. R. China
 Instructors: Xinjun Mao, Yongfang Liu, Dinghua Shi, Qiyue Cheng

Dr. Roger Cremades is a complex systems scientist and heterodox global change economist integrating human-Earth interactions across systems and scales into modular quantitative tools, e.g. connecting drought risks in cities with land use at the river basin scale. He is elected Council member of the Complex Systems Society (2022-2025) and previously served as co-Chair of the Development Team of the Finance and Economics Knowledge-Action Network of Future Earth, the largest global research programme in global change (2020-2022). Roger coordinated research and co-production projects above €1M, and published in top journal like PNAS, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Geoscience. As a scientific modeler in the Social and Ecological Sciences, Roger integrates complex systems concepts into integrated assessment models of global change, with a focus on cities.

The future of CoMSES.Net, in Roger’s vision, is to augment its projection into a hub for discussing state-of-the-art approaches on modeling for the Social and Ecological Sciences, e.g. via bi-annual webinars, so that the Model Library becomes a lighthouse from where all communities developing, sharing, using, and reusing agent-based and other computational models also find valuable discussions to advance their research, education, and computational practice.

My primary research interests lie at the intersection of two fields: evolutionary computation and multi-agent systems. I am specifically interested in how evolutionary search algorithms can be used to help people understand and analyze agent-based models of complex systems (e.g., flocking birds, traffic jams, or how information diffuses across social networks). My secondary research interests broadly span the areas of artificial life, multi-agent robotics, cognitive/learning science, design of multi-agent modeling environments. I enjoy interdisciplinary research, and in pursuit of the aforementioned topics, I have been involved in application areas from archeology to zoology, from linguistics to marketing, and from urban growth patterns to materials science. I am also very interested in creative approaches to computer science and complex systems education, and have published work on the use of multi-agent simulation as a vehicle for introducing students to computer science.

It is my philosophy that theoretical research should be inspired by real-world problems, and conversely, that theoretical results should inform and enhance practice in the field. Accordingly, I view tool building as a vital practice that is complementary to theoretical and methodological research. Throughout my own work I have contributed to the research community by developing several practical software tools, including BehaviorSearch (http://www.behaviorsearch.org/)

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Hamedan University of Technology, Hamedan, IRAN. I have completed my Ph.D. in Futures Studies (foresight) as an interdisciplinary field, an intersection of social sciences and engineering. My
background comes from computer science. For my Ph.D., I decided to pursue my education in Futures Studies; the field I thought I could apply engineering principles such as requirements engineering, analytical skills, design, modeling, planning, and, test engineering to shape the
desired futures. In PhD, I started the complex systems research field and agent-based modeling with NetLogo. In addition to several publications of papers, I published a book on complex systems titled “Futures Studies in Complex Systems” which was awarded as the book of the year by the Iranian Foresight Association.

Since May 2021, I started a research collaboration with TISSS Lab at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz as a project coordinator, the German Research Centre for AI, Human-Centered Multimedia, and the Centre for Research in Social Simulation. The project title is “AI for Assessment” and its objective is to understand the status quo and the future options of AI-based social assessment in public service provisions to help in the creation of improved AI technology for social welfare systems.

On the executive side, I have also various experiences, including head of the department, deputy of the Technology Incubator Center, director of university’s research affairs, and head of the International Scientific Cooperation Office.