Session 3- Simulating and imagining a society with AI Agents

MODERATOR

FARI Academic Director - Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)

Geoffrey Aerts holds a Master’s degree in European and comparative politics from the Universiteit Antwerpen, a Master after master’s degree in Diplomacy and international relations from the Universiteit Antwerpen and a master’s in management science from the Institute for Transport and Maritime Management Antwerp, ITMMA. In 2015 Geoffrey Aerts obtained a PhD title in applied economics from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, after receiving a research grant, provided to the VUB Chair in public-private partnerships sponsored by Deloitte, Grontmij and Laga. He currently runs the VUB Business development Academy. Geoffrey Aerts’ academic work has focused on knowledge management/transfer, stakeholder management and project management and has been published in major scientific publications, including Project Management Journal and International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics. He furthermore won the triennial Joseph Merlot – Joseph Leclercq prize 2015 awarded by CIRIEC for his work in the field of cooperative economy.

Currently, Geoffrey Aerts is working both as an academic, as well as academic director/entrepreneur. In his academic work, Geoffrey Aerts is affiliated with the Business Technology and Operations research group within the Economics and Social science and Solvay Business School department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he conducts research that studies the optimization of research valorization at the university level and the impact of innovation ecosystems within urban regions.

SPEAKER

Associate Professor working on AI Ethics at the University of Oxford

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, as well as a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, at the University of Oxford.

She works on digital ethics (with an emphasis on privacy and AI ethics), practical ethics more generally, political philosophy, and public policy.

She is the author of Privacy Is Power (an Economist book of the year), The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance (Oxford University Press, 2024), and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics.

She collaborates with private and public institutions as a consultant

SPEAKER

Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST ｜FNR Pearl Chair ｜Affiliate Professor in CS at University of Luxembourg

He is an FNR Pearl Chair and head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at the ITIS department of the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). He is also an Affiliate Professor in CS at the University of Luxembourg. Previously, he has been an ICREA Research Professor at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, the Research center of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) where he led the SOM Research Lab. He was also Visiting Professor at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, associate professor at École des Mines de Nantes as part of an Inria International Chair, postdoc at the University of Toronto, researcher at the Politecnico di Milano and the Technical University of Catalonia and co-founded two startups.

His research falls into the broad area of systems and software engineering, especially promoting the rigorous use of software models in all software tasks while keeping an eye on the most unpredictable element in any project: the people involved in it. Current research topics include pragmatic formal verification techniques, analysis of open source communities, open data exploitation and the role AI can play in software development (and vice versa). Let’s use all the tools at our disposal to build Better Software Faster.