Bio Notes

Francis Heylighen is a research professor at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), where he co-directs the transdisciplinary research Center "Leo Apostel". He is also an editor of the Principia Cybernetica Project, an international organization for the collaborative development of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy.
The main focus of his research is the evolution of complexity: how do higher levels of organization originate (metasystem transitions) and develop? I have worked in particular on the development of knowledge, and its application to the emerging intelligent web, or "global brain".

Margeret Heath is a researcher at the Free University of Brussels on the project "The social construction of shared concepts: empirical study and computer simulation of a distributed cognitive process". This work should lead to a PhD, which she is preparing under the supervision of Frank Van Overwalle and Francis Heylighen, while being advised by Cliff Joslyn, Ben Goertzel and David Spurrett. The topic is the possibility of radical novelty in or imagination in distributed cognition

Frank Van Overwalle is Professor of Social Psychology at the Free University of Brussels. His major research interest is on connectionist models of important domains in social cognition: causal attribution, group biases, person impression formation and attitude formation and change (including cognitive dissonance). He has conducted simulations on representative findings from the literature in these domains using common network architectures and processing parameters in order to develop a general and unified process model of these judgments in social cognition. In addition, he also devised experiments to test some specific predictions that emerged from these network simulations and that sometimes contradict currently held beliefs on how these judgments are made.