Members of the Applied Complexity Group
Roland Bouffanais
Associate Professor & Principal Investigator
Roland Bouffanais was educated at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and holds an ‘Agrégation’ in Physical Sciences (major in Physics). He earned his Ph.D. in Computational Science from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), under the supervision of Prof. Michel O. Deville, for which he was awarded the prestigious IBM Research Prize in Computational Sciences (2008), and the ERCOFTAC Da Vinci Award Silver Medal (2007). He has been a postdoctoral fellow and associate in the laboratory of Prof. Dick K. P. Yue at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and still holds a Research Affiliate appointment with MIT. Prior to joining the faculty at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, Bouffanais worked as scientific collaborator under the supervision of Prof. Bastien Chopard in the Department of Computer Science at the Université de Genève.
Dr. Roland Bouffanais is an Associate Professor at the University of Geneva specialized in complex systems science. He is the Principal Investigator at the Applied Complexity Group. Bouffanais has worked in a number of areas in computational science and has expanded his research on complex systems into three major synergistic thrusts: (1) Multi-Agent Systems, (2) Computational Social Science, and (3) Complex Urban Systems. Over the past three years, his focus has been on problems centered around social contagions, collective decision-making and human dynamics.
Bouffanais has published 110+ peer-reviewed papers in top rated scientific journals and conference proceedings. He has authored a monograph titled Design and Control of Swarm Dynamics, published by Springer in their Complexity Series in 2016. Bouffanais has also published numerous Opinion Pieces and Op-Eds in various newspapers in Asia, Europe and North America. His full list of publications is available here. Bouffanais holds several Editorial Board appointments with leading interdisciplinary journals: Scientific Reports (Springer-Nature), PLoS one (PLOS), Royal Society Open Science (The Royal Society), Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Frontiers In), and Frontiers in Big Data (Frontiers In).
Honors & Awards
→ Outstanding Paper Award – IEEE MRS 2019 (Rutgers University NJ, US, 2019)
→ SG Mark (Good Design Award) – Swarm Intelligence ORION, Singapore Design Council (2019)
→ Outstanding Education Award – Singapore University of Technology and Design (2019)
→ Best Paper Award – ASME-IDETC 2018 (Québec, Canada, 2018)
→ Invitation to give the ILIAS Distinguished Lecture (University of Luxembourg, 2018)
→ Peer-Review Award (Top Reviewer Assorted Fields) – Publons (2018)
→ Visiting Scholar Invitation – CPU Cluster of Excellence, University of Bordeaux (2015)
→ IMACS 2008 Most Successful Papers Award, in App. Num. Math. (2008)
→ IBM Research Prize in Computational Sciences: “Exceptional quality in Doctoral thesis work” (2008)
→ Finalist EPFL Best Doctoral Thesis (2008)
→ ERCOFTAC Da Vinci Award: “Best European Doctoral thesis on Flow, Turbulence and Combustion”: Silver medal (2007)
→ Swiss National Science Foundation, Prospective Researcher Fellowship (2007)
Mohammadreza Chamanbaz
Senior Research Fellow
Dr. Mohammadreza Chamanbaz was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1985. In 2008 he received his BSc in Electrical Engineering from Shiraz University of Technology, Shiraz, Iran. In 2014 he received his PhD from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore in control science. He was with Data Storage Institute, Singapore as research scholar from 2010 to 2014. From 2014 to 2017, he was postdoctoral research fellow in Singapore University of Technology and Design. He was Assistant Professor in Arak University of Technology, Arak, Iran from Jan 2017 to Jan 2019. He is now senior research fellow in iTrust Center for Research in Cyber Security, Singapore. He is a member of IEEE Technical Committee on Computational Aspects of Control System Design (CACSD). His research activities are mainly focused on probabilistic and randomized algorithms for analysis and control of uncertain systems, convex optimization, robust control, distributed optimization and control and secure control of cyber-physical systems.
Elias J. Willemse
Research Fellow
Dr. Elias J. Willemse is a Research Fellow at Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore. Professional industrial engineer with experience in consulting and research. Areas of interest are Waste Collection and Transportation Management, and transportation optimisation.
Subfields of interest and expertise include Operations Research, Analytics, Data Science, Visualisation, and general industrial engineering modelling. Tools of choice are Python, R and LaTeX.
Niladri S. Tripathy
Research Fellow
Dr. Niladri S. Tripathy completed his Bachelor’s Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering and Master Degree in Mechatronics Engg. in 2009 and 2011, respectively. After completion of his Master’s degree, he worked as a Senior Research Fellow (SRF) in IIT Delhi from 2011 to 2012. In 2017, he received his Ph.D. (Electrical Engg.) degree from IIT Delhi. Presently, he is a Research Fellow at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). His research interests include Control Techniques for Cyber-Physical System, Mechatonics and Application of Control Theory in Computing.
Maryam Kouzehgar
Research Fellow
Dr. Maryam Kouzehgar is a post-doctoral research fellow with Computationally Intensive Design Lab at SUTD-MIT International Design Center (IDC).
I’m currently focused on swarming behaviors oriented with several learning schemes on multi-agent systems while before joining IDC, I was with SUTD ROAR (Robotics and Automation Research) lab involved in intelligent path-planning and improving autonomy of self-reconfigurable robots.
Generally, my current research interests include robotics and vision-based control, engineering applications of fuzzy logic and bio-inspired intelligent optimization techniques, swarm intelligence, reinforcement learning, and deep learning. I mostly focus on the development of novel techniques in intelligent systems and their application in often interdisciplinary contexts.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning that my Ph.D. thesis was about fuzzy signaling games of deception between fuzzily ant-inspired deceptive robots with interactive learning.
Wei Chien, Benny CHIN 陳威全
Research Fellow
Dr. Benny Chin is a geographical information scientist who runs analyses on maps. During his job as a research assistant and during his M.Sc. and Ph.D. studies, I joined the Lab for Geospatial Computational Science Lab in Department of Geography, National Taiwan University, where he worked on some human movement studies (in a Smart City Project), and disease diffusion network studies. Dr. Benny Chin is particularly interested in human mobility and joined the Applied Complexity Group to work on problems of human dynamics at the interface between complexity science and smart cities.
Hian Lee KWA
Ph.D. Candidate
Hian Lee is a Ph.D. student at SUTD and is also a research engineer at Thales. He received his MEng in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Surrey (United Kingdom). His Master dissertation was on metamaterials with negative stiffness. His previous experience includes designing traction control systems for Formula Student cars and developing an automated firefighting drone. Prior to SUTD, Hian Lee has worked at A*STAR and Ecole Centrale de Lyon (France).
Areas of Interest: Fuzzy Logic Systems, Swarm Intelligence, Additive Manufacturing.
Jabez Leong KIT
Ph.D. Candidate
Jabez is a Ph.D. student from the Engineering & Product Development (EPD) Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He graduated in September 2016, with a degree of Bachelor of Engineering (EPD), focused on Aerospace Engineering. Jabez works on distributed computation for multi-robot systems and swarm robotic systems. Jabez is part of the team that was awarded the IEEE-MRS 2019 Outstanding Paper Award.
Areas of Interest: Multi-Robot Systems, Collective Computing, Swarm Intelligence.
Nikolaj Horsevad
Ph.D. Candidate
Nikolaj is a Ph.D. student from the Engineering & Product Development (EPD) Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He received his Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and his Master of Science form Aalborg University (Denmark). Here his work mainly revolved around Control Theory. He now studies the design of artificial swarming systems, with emphasis on the effects the network structure has on the systems emergent collective behavior, using mainly tools from Control Theory and Network Science. He uses a combination of experiments and analytical models in his study of network structures.
Areas of interest: Swarming systems, Network Sciense, Control.
Ajaykumar (Ajay) Manivannan
Ph.D. Candidate
Ajay is a PhD candidate in SUTD specializing in Urban science under Engineering Product Development (EPD) pillar. His doctoral work is focused on emergent mobility patterns in vertical cities. He worked as Research Assistant from 2016-2018 in Applied Complexity Group (ACG) on control of complex networks and computational social science involving social networks and mobility patterns. His Master dissertation was titled ‘Leader-follower networked system under distributed consensus dynamic’. He graduated in 2016 with Master’s degree on Aerospace Engineering from NTU, Singapore and TUM, Germany. His previous works with NTU, Singapore includes CFD analysis of turbochargers, heat transfer analysis on micro-gas turbines and developing active flow control techniques for aircraft wings.
Area of Interest: Network science, Urban complexity, Computation social science, Fluid mechanics.
Sreetej Lakkam
Ph.D. Candidate
Sreetej is a Ph.D. student from the Engineering & Product Development (EPD) Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He received his Master of Science from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Technische Universität Munchën (TUM), Germany in Aerospace Engineering. He was awarded ‘Best Dissertation award’ for his master thesis work on ‘Numerical studies on aircraft wake vortices on airport runways’.
His doctoral work mainly involves turbulent flow systems, with a focus on the prediction of non-linear system dynamics. He works on interdisciplinary problems involving fluid flow simulations and application of machine learning techniques. He enjoys researching for novel advancements in AI that can be applied to his research in fluid dynamics.
His areas of interest include Machine learning, Turbulent flows, Sequence prediction models, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and his tools of choice are Python, Matlab, Fortran, LaTeX
Edith Lawrence
Master Student (Master in Innovation by Design)
Edith is currently pursuing her M Eng in Innovation by Design from Engineering Product Development (EPD) pillar in SUTD. She graduated in April 2018 with a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering) from Anna University. Her undergraduate dissertation and subsequent research internship were on structural and aerodynamic analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Her research interests include Computational Fluid Dynamics, Structural Engineering and Machine Learning.
Youngbin Song
Research Engineer
Youngbin Song is a research officer at Singapore University of Technology and Design. I received my degree in mechanical engineering in 2019 and started working on a project which deals with swarm systems with drones. While I do have a lot of interests, I primarily focus on the application of game engines such as Unity3D and Unreal Engine.
