Nigel Gilbert

Nigel Gilbert read for a first degree in Engineering, intending to go into the computer industry. However, he was lured into sociology and obtained his doctorate on the sociology of scientific knowledge from the University of Cambridge. His research and teaching interests have reflected his continuing interest in both sociology and computer science (and engineering more widely). Since 1998, he has also been Pro Vice-Chancellor for Staff Development at the University of Surrey. He is President of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) and Editor of JASSS.

Department of Sociology
School of Human Sciences
Stag Hill
Guildford
GU2 7XH
United Kingdom

Email: n.gilbert@surrey.ac.uk
Web: http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/nigel_gilbert.htm

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Matthijs den Besten

Matthijs den Besten (1978) was born and raised in the Netherlands. In 2000, he obtained a master's degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Amsterdam and soon after he enrolled in the Ph.D. programme of the faculty of computer science at Darmstadt University of Technology (which is in Germany). In Darmstadt, Matthijs investigated how the specification of scheduling problems affects the design of optimisation algorithms. Between 2001 and 2003 Matthijs went on leave to the University of Oxford where he read for a master's in economic and social history and wrote a thesis on the emergence of bioinformatics. Afterwards, Matthijs returned to Darmstadt to complete his dissertation.

Email: matthijs.denbesten@gmail.com

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Akos Bontovics

Akos Bontovics graduated in computer science at the Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary). His MSc was about intelligent web crawling using reinforcement learning techniques. He is now an assistant research fellow, and he starts hisPh.D. this year.

Email: bontovic@inf.elte.hu

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Bart G.W. Craenen

B.G.W. Craenen currently holds a research associate position at Napier University, Edinburgh. His research for the NewTies project focusses on the use of peer-to-peer networks for the underlying architecture of the project. He will defend his Ph.D. thesis on the use of evolutionary computation techniques for solving the constraint satisfaction problem at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in autumn of this year. After finishing his M.Sc. in computer science at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, he worked for two years as a scientific programmer for the Computational Intelligence Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, before starting his Ph.D. studies there. During his time at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam he was a staff member and member of the Training Committee of EvoNet, the European Network of Excellence in Evolutionary Computing.

Email: b.craenen@napier.ac.uk

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Federico Divina

Dr. Federico Divina is currently a postdoc at Computational Linguistics and AI section of the Tilburg University in the Netherlands. His research inside the NEW TIES project focuses on the emergence and evolution of language. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 at the Computational Intelligence group of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam with a dissertation over the use of hybrid evolutionary computation applied to inductive learning, under the supervision of prof. Gusz Eiben and Elena Marchiori. He visited the Machine Learning group of the University of Seville, Spain, where he applied Evolutionary Computation to bioinformatics problems. He studied Computer Science at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy.

Email: divina@cs.vu.nl

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A.E. Eiben

A.E. Eiben is Professor of Computational Intelligence at the at the Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His main research interests are evolutionary computing and emergent collective intelligence. He is editor of 7 journals related to evolutionary computing and computational intelligence, author or editor of 5 books, most recently Introduction to Evolutionary Computing (with Jim Smith), Springer, 2003.

Artificial Intelligence Section
Department of Computer Science
Faculty of Sciences
Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam (NL)
Netherlands

Email: gusz@cs.vu.nl
Web: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gusz

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Robert Griffioen

Robert Griffioen is currently a postdoc at the AI section of the Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands. His research of the NEW TIES project is the New Ties Agent in particular its learning mechanisms. He is about to finish his Ph.D. about neural networks at the University of Amsterdam, under the supervision of prof.dr. J.M.J. Murre and prof. dr. J. Raaijmakers. He studied Cognitive Artificial Intelligence at the University of Utrecht. \item[C. Tzolov] Christian Tzolov has a masters degree in electrical engineering. After his study he worked for several years as programmer in industries and moved then to the University of Twente as a scientific programmer.

Email: argriffi@few.vu.nl

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Gyorgy Hévízi

György Hévízi studied computer science and physics at the University of Szeged (Hungary). He is finishing his Ph.D. about artificial intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction.

Email: hevizi@netquick.hu

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Andras Lrincz

Dr. habil. A. Lorincz, professor, senior researcher has been teaching at the Faculty of Informatics at Eötvös University, Budapest since 1998. His research focuses on distributed intelligent systems and their applications in neurobiological and cognitive modeling, as well as medicine. He has founded the Neural Information Processing Group of Eötvös University and he directs a multidisciplinary team of mathematicians, programmers, computer scientists and physicists. He has acted as the PI of several successful international projects in collaboration with Panasonic, Honda Future Technology Research and the Information Directorate of the US Air Force in the fields of hardware-software co-synthesis,image processing and human-computer collaboration. He graduated in physics at the Eötvös Loránd University in 1975 where he received his PhD in 1978 and his CSc in 1986 in experimental and theoretical solid-state physics and chemical physics, respectively. He conducted research and taught quantum control, photoacoustics and artificial intelligence at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, University of Chicago, Brown University, Princeton University, the Illinois Institute of Technology and ETH Zurich. He authored about 200 peer reviewed scientific publications. In 1997-1998 he was the scientific director of the Hungarian subsidiary of US-based Associative Computing Ltd. He has received the Széchenyi Professor Award, Master Professor Award and the Széchenyi István Award in 2000, 2001, and 2004, respectively. Four of his students won the prestigious Pro Scientia Gold Medal in the field of information science over the last 4 years. In 2004, he was awarded the Kalmár Prize of the John von Neumann Computer Society of Hungary.

Email: andras.lorincz@t-online.hu

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Ben Paechter

Ben Paechter graduated in Computer Science at the University of Bradford in 1986 and then gained an MSc in Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University. He stayed in Edinburgh joining Napier University as a Lecturer where he formed what is now the Centre for Emergent Computing. He was coordinator of the Framework 5 "DREAM" project which enabled peer-to-peer distributed computing for evolutionary and other algorithms. He is now Professor of Computing and Director of Research and Knowledge Transfer for the School of Computing. Prof. Paechter has reviewed papers for all the major conferences and journals in the area and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Evolutionary Computation.

Email: b.paechter@napier.ac.uk

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Stephan Schuster

Stephan Schuster obtained his degree in Sociology in 1998 from the Free University in Berlin. Before joining the University of Surrey in 2003, he worked as Market Researcher and Software Developer.

Email: s.schuster@surrey.ac.uk

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Martijn C. Schut

Martijn Schut is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He received a MSc from the Vrije Universiteit (NL) and a PhD from the University of Liverpool (UK). His research interests concern the emergence of organisational dynamics in distributed multi-agent systems.

Artificial Intelligence Section
Department of Computer Science
Faculty of Sciences
Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a1081 HV Amsterdam (NL)

Email: schut@cs.vu.nl
Web: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~schut

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Christian Tzolov

Christian Tzolov has a masters degree in electrical engineering. After his study he worked for several years as programmer in industries and moved then to the University of Twente as a scientific programmer.

Email: tzolov@few.vu.nl

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Paul Vogt

Paul Vogt recieved his M.Sc. degree in Cognitive Science and Engineering at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands in 1997 (supervisors Dr. Petra Hendriks and Prof. Dr. Luc Steels). He obtained his Ph.D. in November 2000 at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (supervisor Prof. Dr. Luc Steels). In his thesis, entitled 'Lexicon grounding on mobile robots,' he investigated how a small group of LEGO robots could develop a communication system from scratch for which the symbols were grounded in the robots' environment. From December 2000 until November 2002 he was a postdoc researcher with the Institute for Knowledge and Agent Technology at the Universiteit Maastricht, the Netherlands, after which he held a Visiting Research Fellow at the Language Evolution and Computation Unit (LEC) at the University of Edinburgh. Currently he is a guest researcher at Tilburg University, the Netherlands and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the LEC in Edinburgh. His main research interests are in symbol grounding, language evolution and robotics.

Language Evolution and Computation
40 George Square
Edinburgh
Scotland
EH8 9LL
United Kingdom

Email: paulv@ling.ed.ac.uk
Web: http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv

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Lu Yang

Lu Yang Msc (Southampton), MA (Lancaster), BEc (Dongbei) Lu is investigating certain social challeges from human societies and their relationship with society's culture and stucture. Her research will assist NewTies to build a software environment for an emergent artificial society. Lu holds a Masters degree in information systems from the University of Southampton and she has background in accounting and finance.Tempted by social simulation research method, her PhD in the sociology at the University of Surrey concerns the use of simulation to study the role of affect in newcomers' socialization process among different organizational groups.

Email: l.yang@surrey.ac.uk