Distinguished Lecture: Computer Modelling in Sustainability Science – Dr. Alexis Drogoul
About the Lecture
The increasing risks posed by climate change, natural disasters, biodiversity loss or pandemics require better planning of how human communities can adapt to their impacts in a sustainable way. Imagining tomorrow’s world and making it visible today so that these communities can understand its complexity and debate its evolution: this is the objective of integrated modeling approaches such as agent-based modeling, which make it possible to explore possible trajectories and identify bifurcations, particularly those related to emerging risks and the vulnerability of populations.
These approaches raise crucial challenges in computer science, AI and software engineering, as they rely on the construction and simulation of large-scale artificial worlds in which the behaviors of human societies and their environment must be represented in detail. Yet, they are becoming progressively essential to explore, and even build, scenarios that respond to the sometimes contradictory constraints of the various actors.
Because modeling offers freedoms that practice alone does not allow, and because it can bring out new representations capable of accompanying, or even stimulating, indispensable ruptures, it can help us to reexamine our practices and thus accompany the transition to more sustainable lifestyles. Current research perspectives, illustrated by examples drawn from the work of IRD researchers with Vietnamese partners, will be presented, with the main objective of opening a fruitful discussion on the role of models, and in particular agent-based models, in the new emerging discipline called “Sustainability Science”.
About the Speaker
Dr Alexis DROGOUL holds a PhD and a habilitation thesis in computer science. He was a professor at Sorbonne University from 1994 to 2004, and since 2005, he has been a senior researcher at IRD, the French Research Institute for Sustainable Development. He was the IRD representative in Vietnam from 2017 to 2022.
His work, which has been the subject of more than 200 articles, concerns the development of software tools (such as GAMA, http://gama-platform.org) to assist in the modelling and simulation of socio-environmental systems, with a view to facilitating interdisciplinary work and involving social actors in the construction of models.
As such, he participated in the definition of the fundamental concepts of “agent-based modeling”, while working on numerous applications of this paradigm for environmental decision support, notably in Vietnam, where he has been collaborating with various partners since 1999.
