dr. Y (Yara) Khaluf

Yara Khaluf is Assistant Professor in the Information Technology Group (INF) from the Wageningen University & Research (WUR), within the Department of Social Sciences. Her PhD was on Task Allocation in Robot Swarms for Time-Constrained Tasks. She received her PhD from Paderborn University in Germany in 2014 with cum laude. During her PhD, she spent several research visits at the IRIDIA lab, the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

After obtaining her PhD degree, she was offered a Postdoc position in the research group of Prof. Marco Dorigo at the University of Paderborn (2014-2015). In 2015, she joined IDLab at Ghent University as a postdoc in collective intelligence (2015-2021).

Research focus

• Computational social science (CSS): research here emerges at the intersection of social sciences, and information science. The focus is on understanding, modeling, and simulating complex adaptive systems, for the purpose of (a) behavior prediction, and (b) behavior modulation. Several modeling methodologies are exploited, such as Agent-based modeling, system dynamics, population modeling, and other. 
• Hybrid societies: these are societies in which artificial agents are integrated into our real world and, more particularly, are dealing with humans. It focuses on designing novel cognitive capacities for artificial agents so that successful interaction with humans becomes feasible. Besides the individual modeling, special attention is paid to social feedback networks that can facilitate the interactions between the two types (agent-human and agent-agent).
• Distributed artificial cognition: the focus is on large-scale distributed systems, in which individuals can interact with each other to exchange any kind of information that helps them to perform beyond their own capacities. This type of system is referred to mostly as a collective system. Collective systems demonstrate complex behaviors that emerge from both (a) the individual simple rules, and (ii) a large number of interactions between the individuals.

Funded projects

• PI in Chronopilot: “Modulating Human Subjective Time Experience”, funded by the European Commission via the Horizon202 FET-open call, will start in the first half of 2021
• PI in DELICIOS: “An integrated approach to study the delegation of conflict-of-interest decisions to autonomous agents”, funded by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) started on 01.01.2019 and runs until 31.12.2022

Awards

• 4-year fellowship by the highly competitive International Graduate School (IGS)
• 2-year fellowship from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-DFG) to spend it on a postdoc position at IRIDIA, under the supervision of Prof. Marco Dorigo.

Collaboration backgrounds

• World experts in swarm intelligence, including Prof. Marco Dorigo, Prof. Thomas Stuetzle, and Prof. Mauro Birattari
• Prominent scientists in collective decision-making, such as Prof. Heiko Hamann and Prof. James Marshall
• Active experimental and cognitive psychologists, including Prof. Petter Johansson, Prof. Knut Drewing, and Prof. Argiro Vatakis.