My research interests are organized around four main areas:

🌱 Socio-ecological systems dynamics
I study the interactions between human societies and ecosystems, with particular attention to the social, economic, and political processes that shape these dynamics.

💚 Nature’s values
I explore the diverse ways in which people value nature and work on integrating these perspectives into decision-making processes and public policy design.

🦋 Biodiversity management and conservation
I apply computer vision, statistical modeling, and spatial analysis to species classification and monitoring, generating evidence to support biodiversity management and conservation strategies.

🏛️ Governance and public policy
I analyze policy integration and coherence using quantitative and data-driven methods, aiming to improve policy design, implementation, and decision-making processes.

Overall, my research seeks to integrate interdisciplinary approaches to strengthen sustainability, generating knowledge and innovative tools based on data science and artificial intelligence that support both public policy development and the management and conservation of socio-ecological systems.

My core research interest is to understand how humans and other living creature perceive and behave; respond and act upon their environment and how this dynamic interplay shapes us into who we are. In recognition of the broad scope of this question I am a strong believer in the need for inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches and have worked at research groups in a wide range of departments and institutions, including university departments of Physics as well as Psychology, a bio-medical research lab, a robotics research laboratory and most recently the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. Though my work has primarily taken the form of computational neuroscience I have also performed psychophysical experiments with healthy human subjects, been involved in neural imaging experiments and contributed towards the development of a humanoid robot.

Based on the philosophy of ‘understanding through creating’ I believe that bio-mimetic and biologically inspired computational and robotic engineering can teach us not only how to build more flexible and robust tools but also how actual living creatures deal with their environment. I am therefore a strong believer in the fertile information exchange between scientific as well as engineering research disciplines.

Kenneth D. Aiello is a postdoctoral research scholar with the Global BioSocial Complexity Initiative at ASU. Kenneth’s research contributes to cross disciplinary conversations on how historical developments in biological, social, and cultural knowledge systems are governed by processes that transform the structure, dynamics, and function of complex systems. Applying computational historical analysis and epistemology to question what scientific knowledge is and how we can analyze changes in knowledge, he uses text analysis, social network analysis, and machine learning to measure similarities and differences between the knowledge claims of individual agents and groups. His work builds on how to assess contested knowledge claims and measure the evolution of knowledge across complex systems and multiple dimensions of scale. This approach also engages in dynamic new debates about global and local structures of knowledge shaped by technological innovation within microbiology related to public policy, shrinking resources given to biomedical ideas as opposed to “translation”, and the ethics of scientific discovery. Using interdisciplinary methods for understanding historical content and context rich narratives contributes to understanding new domains and major transitions in science and provides a richer understanding of how knowledge emerges.

Social network analysis has an especially long tradition in the social science. In recent years, a dramatically increased visibility of SNA, however, is owed to statistical physicists. Among many, Barabasi-Albert model (BA model) has attracted particular attention because of its mathematical properties (i.e., obeying power-law distribution) and its appearance in a diverse range of social phenomena. BA model assumes that nodes with more links (i.e., “popular nodes”) are more likely to be connected when new nodes entered a system. However, significant deviations from BA model have been reported in many social networks. Although numerous variants of BA model are developed, they still share the key assumption that nodes with more links were more likely to be connected. I think this line of research is problematic since it assumes all nodes possess the same preference and overlooks the potential impacts of agent heterogeneity on network formation. When joining a real social network, people are not only driven by instrumental calculation of connecting with the popular, but also motivated by intrinsic affection of joining the like. The impact of this mixed preferential attachment is particularly consequential on formation of social networks. I propose an integrative agent-based model of heterogeneous attachment encompassing both instrumental calculation and intrinsic similarity. Particularly, it emphasizes the way in which agent heterogeneity affects social network formation. This integrative approach can strongly advance our understanding about the formation of various networks.

My research interests centre on the study of individual preferences in economics and on understanding how preferences evolve through interaction, learning, and social context. I am particularly interested in how seemingly weak or latent preferences—such as attitudes toward environmental attributes, prices, or social norms—can become amplified through feedback mechanisms and generate non-linear aggregate outcomes. A core methodological focus of my work is the use of agent-based modelling and economic simulation as a bridge between economic theory and experimentation. By treating agent-based models as computational laboratories, I explore how heterogeneous preferences, habit formation, peer influence, and firm behaviour interact dynamically, allowing theoretical mechanisms to be tested, stress-tested, and compared under controlled but flexible conditions that are difficult to achieve using purely analytical or empirical approaches.

Complex Systems, Social Modeling and Simulation
Engineering the Futures

The Global Resource Observatory (GRO)

The Global Resource Observatory is largest single research project being undertaken at the GSI, it investigates how the scarcity of finite resources will impact global social and political fragility in the short term. The ambitious three year project, funded by the Dawe Charitable Trust, will enable short term decision making to account for ecological and financial constraints of a finite planet.

GRO will include an open source multidimensional model able to quantify the likely short term interactions of the human economy with the carrying capacity of the planet and key scarce resources. The model will enable exploration of the complex interconnections between the resource availability and human development, and provides projections over the next 5 years.

Data and scenarios will be geographically mapped to show the current and future balance and distribution of resources across and within countries. The GRO tool will, for the first time, enable the widespread integration of the implications of depleting key resource into all levels of policy and business decision-making.

Economics, society, complexity, systems, ecosystem, thermodynamics, agent-based modelling, emergent behaviour, evolution.

Complex adaptive systems, sustainability, evolution, computational social science, data science, empirical computer science, industrial regeneration, artificial intelligence