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.

My main research areas are agent-based modelling, urban analytics and complex decision making enabled by AI. I am interested in the bottom-up transition of complex urban systems under major socio-economic and environmental shocks, such as climate change and the fourth industrial revolution. I want to understand how cities as self-organised complex systems respond to external shocks and evolve under a constantly changing environment. In the past, I have looked at various aspects of urban systems, including the housing market, the labour market, transport and energy system. I am also interested in decision making in complex systems. For example, I have studied the decision to become a vegetarian/vegan under social influence. I have also looked at global food trade in a complex trade network and the resulting food and nutrition security. Recently, I am interested in applying AI algorithms especially reinforcement learning in multi-agent systems, including applications of AI in urban adaptation to climate change, housing market dynamics and criminal behaviour in an urban system.

Muaz is a Senior Member of the IEEE and has more than 15 years of professional, teaching and research experience. Muaz has been working on Communication Systems and Networks since 1995. His BS project in 1995 was on the development of a Cordless Local Area Network. In 1996, his postgraduate project was on Wireless Connectivity of devices to Computers. In addition to his expertise as an Communications engineer, his areas of research interest are in the development of agent-based and complex network-based models of Complex Adaptive Systems. He has worked on diverse case studies ranging from Complex Communication Networks, Biological Networks, Social Networks, Ecological system modeling, Research and Scientometric modeling and simulation etc. He has also worked on designing and developing embedded systems, distributed computing, multiagent and service-oriented architectures.

I work in the field of complex adaptive systems, specializing in multi-agent systems, simulation, machine learning, collective intelligence, self-organization, and self-adaptation. I am interested in contributing to innovative projects and research in these domains.

My experience spans across multiple large-scale international research projects in areas such as green urban logistics, blockchain for nuclear applications, autonomous robotics systems and simulation of biological neural networks.

I am an Associate Professor of Data Analytics at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I was the Director of Postgraduate Teaching at the Department of Management Science, Lancaster University Management School overseeing MSc programmes in Business Analytics, Management Science and Marketing Analytics, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, e-Business and Innovation, and Project Management.

My research interests lie in the areas of predictive analytics using simulation. I am particularly interested in simulation modelling methodology (symbiotic simulation, hybrid modelling, agent-based simulation, discrete-event simulation) with applications in operations and supply chain management (e.g. hospital, manufacturing, transportation, warehouse) and social dynamics (e.g. diffusion of perception). Currently, I am the associate editor of the Journal of Simulation and the secretary of The OR Society‘s Special Interest Group in Simulation. I am the track coordinator of Agent-Based Simulation for the Winter Simulation Conference 2018.

I am a spatial (GIS) agent-based modeler i.e. modeler that simulates the impact of various individual decisions on the environment. My work is mainly methodological i.e. I develop tools that make agent-based modeling (ABM) easier to do. I especially focus on developing tools that allow for evaluating various uncertainties in ABM. One of these uncertainties are the ways of quantifying agent decisions (i.e. the algorithmic representation of agent decision rules) for example to address the question of “How do the agents decide whether to grow crops or rather put land to fallow?”. One of the methods I developed focuses on representing residential developers’ risk perception for example to answer the question: “to what extent is the developer risk-taking and would be willing to build new houses targeted at high-income families (small market but big return on investment)?”. Other ABM uncertainties that I evaluate are various spatial inputs (e.g. different representations of soil erosion, different maps of environmental benefits from land conservation) and various demographics (i.e. are retired farmers more willing to put land to conservation?). The tools I develop are mostly used in (spatial) sensitivity analysis of ABM (quantitative, qualitative, and visual).

I conduct long-term behavioral and ecological field research on several species in the primate community of Amazonian Ecuador to investigate the ways in which ecological conditions (such as the abundance and distribution of food resources) and the strategies of conspecifics together shape primate behavior and social relationships and ultimately determine the kinds of societies we see primates living in. This is a crucial and central focus in evolutionary anthropology, as understanding the ways in which behavior and social systems are shaped by environmental pressures is a fundamental part of the discipline.

I complement my field studies with molecular genetic laboratory work and agent-based simulation modeling in order to address issues that are typically difficult to explore through observational studies alone, including questions about dispersal behavior, gene flow, mating patterns, population structure, and the fitness consequences of individual behavior. In collaboration with colleagues, I have also started using molecular techniques to investigate a number of broader questions concerning the evolutionary history, social systems, and ecological roles of various New World primates.