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.

My main research interest is the application of computer simulation to study human-centric complex adaptive systems. I am a strong advocate of Object Oriented Agent-Based Social Simulation. This is a novel and highly interdisciplinary research field, involving disciplines like Social Science, Economics, Psychology, Operations Research, Geography, and Computer Science. My current research focusses on Urban Sustainability and I am a co-investigator in several related projects and a member of the university’s “Sustainable and Resilient Cities” Research Priority Area management team.

I am a Professor in the School of Sustainability and the Director of the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment. I want to understand how people solve collective problems at different levels of scale, especially those problems related to sustainability of our environment. Our society experience unprecedented challenged to sustain common resource for future generations at a scale we have never experienced before. What makes groups cooperate? What is the role of information? How does the ecological context affect the social fabric? How do they deal with a changing environment? How can we use these insight to address global challenges? To do this research I combine behavioral experiments, agent-based modeling and case study analysis.