Andrew Crooks is a geospatial computational social scientist and a Professor within the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo (UB). He holds a PhD in Geography from University College London and prior to joining UB he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of computational social science at George Mason University. Andrew’s area of expertise relates to exploring, understanding the natural and socio-economic environments with a specific emphasis on cities through the lens of computational social science. For Andrew to carry out his research he utilizes methods from geographical information systems (GIS), social network analysis (SNA) and agent-based modeling (ABM). He is the lead author of the book “Agent-Based Modelling and Geographical Information Systems: A Practical Primer” and co-edited “Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems.” His research has been funded by numerous US government agencies and he has published widely in interdisciplinary journals. Andrew is co-editor of Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science and serves on several leading GIS editorial boards. More information about Andrew can be found on his research website: https://www.gisagents.org/
Guillaume Deffuant is an applied mathematician by training and he holds a PhD in cognitive science.He is currently a senior researcher at INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture Food and Environment) at the “Laboratoire d’Ingénierie des Systèmes Complexes” (Clermont-Ferrand, France). His main research interest is modelling social dynamics with a particular focus on explaining their emergent features. In collaboration with colleagues, he developed and studied agent based models (for instance about farmer decision processes) derived from multiple sources of data as well as more abstract individual based models of opinion dynamics.He is also interested in regulating complex dynamics in order to enhance the resilience of specific properties or patterns of the system. He coordinated or participated in numerous European or French research projects on these topics.