PhD student in the Agent Systems Research Group of the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the VU University Amsterdam. Current research focuses on Modeling Human Behavior and exploring Serious Games interactions with humans.

My main research interests are the theoretical and experimental analysis of the dynamics of social networks, in relation to problems of cooperation and conflict.

My work centers on evaluating the adaptiva capacity and proposing strategies for managing forest under climate change in both temperate and tropical areas.

Development and usage of demographic microsimulation tools and applications, in particular combining statistical modeling and social theory

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network science; social networks; sociology; complex systems; ecological psychology; cognitive science; perception and action

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).

Christian Reynolds is a Public Health Research Fellow at the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Aberdeen, and an adjunct Research Fellow at the Barbara Hardy Institute for Sustainable Environments and Technologies, University of South Australia. Christian’s research examines the economic and environmental impacts of food consumption; with focus upon food waste, sustainable diets, and the political power of food in international relations.
Christian has experience in economic input-output, material flow and environmental (Life Cycle Analysis) modelling and has published peer reviewed articles on these topics.

General Question:
Without Central Control is self organization possible?

Specific Case:

Considering the seemingly preplanned, densely aggregated communities of the prehistoric Puebloan Southwest, is it possible that without centralized authority (control), that patches of low-density communities dispersed in a bounded landscape could quickly self-organize and construct preplanned, highly organized, prehistoric villages/towns?

My research centers on isolating how and to what extent political institutions themselves shape policy. I use computational modeling (agent-based and simulation) to gain theoretical leverage on the issue. This approach allows me to place groups of actors with given preferences into different institutional settings in order to gauge the effect of the rules of the game on political outcomes. Most of my research examines the ways in which legislative processes affect issues of political economy, such as income redistribution.