Geneva television channel Léman Bleu reports on the Science in Diplomacy Lab and its digital platform for anticipating global negotiations: « Une plateforme numérique pour anticiper les négociations mondiales » (in French).
Photo: Campus Biotech (campusbiotech.ch)
Our new preprint studies the interplay between graph geometry and the manifold of node attributes, and how their misalignment reveals hidden structure in attributed graphs.
Aligning the Unseen in Attributed Graphs: Interplay between Graph Geometry and Node Attributes Manifold
Labarthe A, Bouffanais R & Randon-Furling J, arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.22806 (2026).
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) funds the four-year project “Transitions in Social Contagions: Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs for Collective Decision Systems” (grant 10.006.541, CHF 510,930, January 2026 – December 2029). The project extends our work on the transition from simple to complex contagion to higher-order interactions, with applications to collective decision-making.
From 12 to 14 January 2026 at Campus Biotech in Geneva, the Science in Diplomacy Lab (SiDLab) and the Geneva Transformative Governance Lab (GTGLab) organized the Triangle Azur World Knowledge Dialogue 2026, “Multilateralism in Crisis: The Role of Science Diplomacy in Turbulent Times”, in collaboration with GESDA, the Geneva Science-Policy Interface and the UN University Centre for Policy Research, and with the support of the Universities of Geneva, Lausanne and Neuchâtel.
Over three days, researchers, diplomats and practitioners examined how scientific evidence, data, computational approaches and complex-systems thinking can support more resilient and anticipatory global governance: science for multilateralism (day 1), multilateralism as a complex adaptive system (day 2), and governance design, with the co-production of a GSPI policy brief and an academic perspective article (day 3).
Using U.S. diplomatic communications, our new preprint shows how hypergraph representations reveal higher-order interactions in complex networks.
Revealing Higher-Order Interactions in Complex Networks: A U.S. Diplomacy Case Study
Rondeau A, Wernli D & Bouffanais R, arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.10333 (2025).
A new working paper proposes a data science approach to measure gridlock in the United Nations Security Council from 1946 to 2024.
A Data Science Approach to Measure Gridlock in the United Nations Security Council from 1946 to 2024
Scherer D, Chopard B, Levrat N, Bouffanais R & Wernli D, SSRN 5527746 (2025).
A new working paper builds the citation network of United Nations resolutions and shows how it reveals patterns of norm diffusion in multilateral governance.
Citation Network of United Nations Resolutions Reveals Norm Diffusion Patterns in Multilateral Governance
Wernli D, Bouffanais R, Levrat N, Scherer D & Sauser J, SSRN 5390403 (2025).
Roland Bouffanais has been appointed Director of the Computer Science Department of the Faculty of Science, University of Geneva.
Congratulations to Ajaykumar (Ajay) Manivannan, who successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and obtained his doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ottawa. His thesis, “Characterization and Analysis of Human Vertical Mobility in Complex Urban Environments: Interplay with Horizontal Mobility and Implications for High-Density Urban Design”, supervised by Roland Bouffanais, tackles a blind spot of mobility research: as cities grow denser and taller, human movement is still mostly studied in two dimensions. Using barometric and multi-sensor data with machine learning, he developed methods to detect vertical movements, revealed for the first time the spatiotemporal patterns of vertical mobility and their interplay with horizontal mobility, and used network science to show how the layout of an integrated vertical development—Kampung Admiralty in Singapore—shapes the way its users move. Ajay joined the group in Singapore as a research assistant in 2016.
Journal articles
Conference papers
On 28 February 2025, Roland Bouffanais was one of four invited speakers at the Mary Ann Mansigh Conversation “Science and Diplomacy” at EPFL in Lausanne. The series is jointly organized by CECAM and the NCCR MARVEL.
Roland opened the program with the talk “Computational diplomacy: Understanding and analyzing international relations in the digital age”. He showed how artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning can be used to study multilateral governance and decision-making, and to uncover hidden patterns in global diplomatic dynamics. His examples included global health crises and climate diplomacy. He also presented research initiatives of the SiDLab (Science in Diplomacy Lab), a joint effort of the University of Geneva and ETH Zürich.
The other speakers were:
Sara Bonella (CECAM and MARVEL) introduced the session. The talks were followed by an open discussion with the audience.
[Event page] [Video recording] [Mary Ann Mansigh Conversation Series]