I am a lowly civil servant moonlighting as a PhD student interested in urban informatics, Smart Cities, artificial intelligence/machine learning, all-things geospatial and temporal, advanced technologies, agent-based modeling, and social complexity… and enthusiastically trying to find a combination thereof to form a disseration. Oh… and I would like to win the lottery.

Paul Hart BSc (Liverpool), BA (Open University), PhD (Liverpool), MAE, FLS, FMBA. From 1973-1976 I worked on the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey at the Oceanographic Laboratory, Edinburgh. From 1973 – 1976 I was employed by Nordreco AB (a Nestlé R & D company) in Sweden as a fishery biologist where he advised the Findus group on fish raw material supplies and assessed the future potential of aquaculture. In 1976 I moved to the University of Leicester as a lecturer in aquatic biology. My research focused on the foraging behaviour of fish with a side interest in marine commercial fisheries. I retired as Professor and Head of the Department of Biology and am now an Emeritus Professor. I was a Trustee of the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, which ran the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey until it was merged with the Marine Biological Association: I then became a Trustee of the MBA. From 2010 – 2016 I was a member of the Science Advisory Board of Marine Scotland. I am co-author of Fisheries Ecology (1982) and co-editor of the two-volume Handbook of Fish Biology and Fisheries (2002). I was a co-editor of the journal Fish and Fisheries (Wiley) between 2000 and 2021.

Dr. William G. Kennedy, “Bill,” is continuing to learn in a third career, this time as an academic, a computational social scientist.

His first a career was in military service as a Naval Officer, starting with the Naval Academy, Naval PostGraduate School (as the first computer science student from the Naval Academy), and serving during the Cold War as part of the successful submarine-based nuclear deterrent. After six years of active duty service, he served over two decades in the Naval Reserves commanding three submarine and submarine-related reserve units and retiring after 30 years as a Navy Captain with several personal honors and awards.

His second career was in civilian public service: 10 years at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and 15 years with the Department of Energy. At the NRC he rose to be an advisor to the Executive Director for Operations and the authority on issues concerning the reliance on human operators for reactor safety, participating in two fly-away accident response teams. He left the NRC for a promotion and to lead, as technical director, the entrepreneurial effort to explore the use of light-water and accelerator technologies for the production of nuclear weapons materials. That work led to him becoming the senior policy officer responsible for strategic planning and Departmental performance commitments, leading development of the first several DOE strategic plans and formal performance agreements between the Secretary of Energy and the President.

Upon completion of doctoral research in Artificial Intelligence outside of his DOE work, he began his third career as a scientist. That started with a fully funded, three-year post-doctoral research position in cognitive robotics at the Naval Research Laboratory sponsored by the National Academy of Science and expanding his AI background with research in experimental Cognitive Science. Upon completion, he joined the Center for Social Complexity, part of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University in 2008 where he is now the Senior Scientific Advisor. His research interests range from cognition at the individual level to models of millions of agents representing individual people. He is currently leading a multi-year project to characterize the reaction of the population of a mega-city to a nuclear WMD (weapon of mass destruction) event.

Dr. Kennedy holds a B.S. in mathematics from the U.S. Naval Academy, and Master of Science in Computer Science from the Naval PostGraduate School, and a Ph.D. in Information Technology from George Mason University and has a current security clearance. Dr. Kennedy is a member of Sigma Xi, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a life member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a STEM volunteer with the Senior Scientists and Engineers/AAAS Volunteer Program for K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education in the DC-area schools.

I studied Molecular Biology and Genetics at Istanbul Technical University. During my undergraduate studies I became interested in the field of Ecology and Evolution and did internships on animal behaviour in Switzerland and Ireland. I then went on to pursue a 2-year research Master’s in Evolutionary Biology (MEME) funded by the European Union. I worked on projects using computer simulations to investigate evolution of social complexity and human cooperation. I also did behavioural economics experiments on how children learn social norms by copying others. After my Master’s, I pursued my dream of doing fieldwork and investigating human societies. I did my PhD at UCL, researching cultural evolution and behavioural adaptations in Pygmy hunter-gatherers in the Congo. During my PhD, I was part of an inter-disciplinary Hunter-Gatherer Resilience team funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I obtained a postdoctoral research fellowship from British Academy after my PhD. I am currently working as a British Academy research fellow and lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology and Evolutionary Medicine at UCL.

Andrew Crooks is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment between the Computational Social Science Program within the Department of Computational and Data Sciences and the Department of Geography and GeoInformation Science, which are part of the College of Science at George Mason University. His areas of expertise specifically relate to integrating agent-based modeling (ABM) and geographic information systems (GIS) to explore human behavior. Moreover, his research focuses on exploring and understanding the natural and socio-economic environments specifically urban areas using GIS, spatial analysis, social network analysis (SNA), Web 2.0 technologies and ABM methodologies.

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.