Roland Bouffanais gave an invited seminar for the CHArtS team (Complexity, Humanities, Art, Societies) at Centre Borelli, ENS Paris-Saclay, on 14 February 2025, on modeling social contagions through the lens of complexity science.
How has the environment been addressed in global health governance? Our analysis of the environment-related resolutions adopted by the World Health Assembly from 1948 to 2023 is published in The Lancet Planetary Health.
The Environment in Global Health Governance: an Analysis of Environment-Related Resolutions Adopted at the World Health Assembly from 1948 to 2023
Evrard M, Rieckhoff A, Shipton L, Jørgensen PS, Falcone JL, Bouffanais R, Chopard B, Levrat N & Wernli D, The Lancet Planetary Health 9, e103 (2025).
The Fondation de l’Université de Genève (FUNIGE) awards CHF 4.4 million over four years (2025–2028) to the Science in Diplomacy Lab (SiDLab), co-directed by Roland Bouffanais and Didier Wernli and jointly operated with ETH Zürich.
[SiDLab]
Roland Bouffanais took part as an invited scientific observer in the 29th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29), Baku, 11–22 November 2024, as part of the University of Geneva delegation, contributing SiDLab’s work on consensus and collective decision-making in climate diplomacy.
Pictured: Roland Bouffanais with two colleagues and collaborators from the UNFCCC at COP29.
[COP29]
Congratulations to Julien Philippot, who successfully defended his Master’s thesis on 27 June 2024 and obtained his Master of Applied Science (MASc) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ottawa. His thesis, “Enhancing Swarm Efficiency: Exploration-Exploitation Tuning for Fast Target Tracking”, supervised by Roland Bouffanais, asks how to design a swarm of robots that can efficiently search for and track targets moving faster than any individual robot. Using simple decentralized rules—repulsion between agents to explore and attraction towards the target to exploit—he showed how the network connectivity, agent memory and the addition of fast agents can be tuned to balance exploration and exploitation and optimize the swarm’s performance.
Publications with Julien Philippot
Journal articles
- H. L. Kwa, J. Philippot & R. Bouffanais, “Effect of Swarm Density on Collective Tracking Performance”, Swarm Intelligence, 17, 253–281 (2023). [DOI]
- H. L. Kwa, J. L. Kit, N. Horsevad, J. Philippot, M. Savari & R. Bouffanais, “Adaptivity: A Path Towards General Swarm Intelligence?”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 10, 1163185 (2023). [DOI] [PDF]
- H. L. Kwa, V. Babineau, J. Philippot & R. Bouffanais, “Adapting the Exploration-Exploitation Balance in Heterogeneous Swarms: Tracking Evasive Targets”, Artificial Life, 29, 1–16 (2022). [DOI] [PDF]
Conference papers
How does the interplay between topology and function shape the way people move through an integrated urban development? Our study is published in Scientific Reports.
Effects of the Interplay Between Topology and Function of an Integrated Urban Development on Patterns of User Movement
Manivannan A, Chin WCB, Gopalakrishnan S, Wong D, Schroepfer T & Bouffanais R, Scientific Reports 14, 7021 (2024).
Roland Bouffanais joins the University of Geneva as Associate Professor and Chair in Computational Diplomacy, with a joint appointment in the Faculty of Science and the Global Studies Institute. The Applied Complexity Group moves with him to Geneva.
Our paper “Multi-Target Pursuit by a Decentralized Heterogeneous UAV Swarm using Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning” (Kouzehgar, Song, Meghjani & Bouffanais) has been accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023), London, 29 May – 2 June 2023.
GESDA
The Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) supports the partnership between the University of Geneva and ETH Zürich for the Science in Diplomacy Lab (SiDLab), with CHF 750,000 over 2023–2027.
[GESDA]