Francis Heylighen's PhD Students

The list below is meant to give an idea of the variety of subjects and backgrounds, and to link to the relevant home page or work description for the people interested in more details about this particular work. The discipline and country mentioned behind a researcher's name is merely the one where they got their basic degree, not in general the one of their present work. In practice, all subjects fall within the broad, transdisciplinary domain of evolutionary cybernetics, or what I might summarize as: the self-organization and evolution of distributed, cognitive systems.

Most of this research is being done within the new ECCO group that I direct. I advise the others more from a distance, as their main affiliation is elsewhere.

Within ECCO

Klaas Chielens (linguistics, Belgium):

started 2004, subject "Evolutionary Aspects of Language Spreading: Quantitative Research of Memetic Selection Processes in the Distribution of Virus hoaxes"

Mixel Kiemen (computer science, Belgium) :

simulation of innovation by agents learning to "improperly" use objects, thus discovering new functions and "appropriating" parts of the environment

Marko Rodriguez (computer science, USA)

development of societal-scale decision-support system capable of tapping the collective intelligence potential of a society

Clément Vidal (philosophy, France)

evolutionary theories of cosmology

Shwetambhara Sabharwal (psychology, India)

influence of relations and emotions on cognitive categorization

Erden Göktepe (political science, Turkey)

complexity and self-organization theories applied to the emergence of new actors and institutions in international relations

Former

Carlos Gershenson (computer science, Mexico):

started 2002, defended 2007, subject: "Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems" (co-promotor with D. Aerts)

Johan Bollen (psychology, Belgium):

thesis "A Cognitive Model of Adaptive Web Design and Navigation: a shared knowledge perspective", started 1994, defended 2001 (co-promotor F. Van Overwalle). Since Jan. 2002, Johan heads his own research groep at the Old Dominion University, in Virginia, USA.

Bertin Martens (economics, Belgium):

thesis "The Cognitive Mechanics of Economic Development and Institutional Change", started 1998, defended 2004. (co-promotor with M. Despontin).

Leor Gründlinger (computer science, Israel):

started 1999, stopped 2001, subject "Collective intelligence in on-line election markets"