I have been involved in agent-based modelling since the early nineties with a consistent attention to methdological improvement, institutional development and empirical issues. My mission is that ABM should be a routinely accepted research method (with a robust methodology) across the social sciences. To this end I have built diverse models and participated in research projects across economics, law, medicine, psychology, anthropology and sociology. I took a DPhil in economics on adaptive firm behaviour and then was involved in two research projects on money management and farmer decision making. Since 2006 I have worked at the Department of Sociology (now the School of Media, Communication and Sociology) at the University of Leicester. I was involved in the founding of JASSS and (more recently RofASSS https://rofasss.org) and have regularly served on the review panels for international conferences in the ABM community.

Dr. Mariam Kiran is a Research Scientist at LBNL, with roles at ESnet and Computational Research Division. Her current research focuses on deep reinforcement learning techniques and multi-agent applications to optimize control of system architectures such as HPC grids, high-speed networks and Cloud infrastructures.. Her work involves optimization of QoS, performance using parallelization algorithms and software engineering principles to solve complex data intensive problems such as large-scale complex decision-making. Over the years, she has been working with biologists, economists, social scientists, building tools and performing optimization of architectures for multiple problems in their domain.

Gary Polhill did a degree in Artificial Intelligence and a PhD in Neural Networks before spending 18 months in industry as a professional programmer. Since 1997 he has been working at the Institute on agent-based modelling of human-natural systems, and has worked on various international and interdisciplinary projects using agent-based modelling to study agricultural systems, lifestyles, and transitions to more sustainable ways of living. In 2016, he was elected President of the European Social Simulation Association, and was The James Hutton Institute’s 2017 Science Challenge Leader on Developing Technical and Social Innovations that Support Sustainable and Resilient Communities.

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.