Social Simulation for a Crisis Results and Lessons from Simulating the COVID-19 Crisis

Frank Dignum is a Dutch computer scientist. Since February 2019 he is a Professor of Socially-Aware AI at Umeå University and a part-time associate professor at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences of the Utrecht University. He also is a honorary principle research fellow in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. Dignum is best known from his work on software agents, multi-agent systems and fundamental aspects of social agents including norms, social rules and communication. This work is performed in the context of social simulations, games and dialogue management systems.



Dignum received his PhD in 1989 from the VU University Amsterdam. He started his academic career as assistant professor and chair of the department of Computer Science at the University of Swaziland in 1990. In 1992 he moved back to Portugal and became assistant professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. After coming back in the Netherlands in 1993 as assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, in 2000 he was appointed Associate professor at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences of the Utrecht University.