Welcome to my website!

I am a Førsteamanuensis (Associate Professor) at the Department of Computer Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Gjøvik, Norway (see profile). My research interests revolve around the modelling, analysis and the reconstruction of emergence processes associated with institutions, captured in the theme of institutional modelling.

Institutional Modelling operates at the intersection of computer science and social sciences, addressing the question of how artificial entities – agents – can develop an understanding of their “normative reality” (or socio-institutional perspective) in order to model cooperation and conflict behaviour observed in real human societies. Part of this effort includes the development of representational mechanisms that offer a clear and ideally comprehensive specification of institutions with the aim to accommodate various disciplinary perspectives and their corresponding analytical objectives and methodological traditions. Earlier efforts include nADICO, a refinement of Crawford and Ostrom’s institutional grammar by introducing concepts of nesting to capture institutional content more comprehensively. The latest effort in this context is the work on the Institutional Grammar 2.0 together with Saba Siddiki, which enables novel modelling opportunities, but also improves the coding of policy in the first place. Beyond this, my research looks at how can we can use such mechanisms to inform policy, or even generate institutional structures that can be applied in the real world (e.g., by means of distributed ledger technology).

In addition to my research, I am teaching in the area of cloud computing and serious games and am the current coordinator for the Master in Applied Computer Science at NTNU. Prior to my current role, I was a lecturer at the Otago Polytechnic (New Zealand) in the area of systems development and operations (operating systems, system administration, virtualization). I completed my PhD in the area of Agent-based Modelling, or more specifically, Agent-based Institutional Modelling at the University of Otago (New Zealand).

This site offers an overview of my research interests, developed concepts, and associated publications (see menu at the top of this page). Over time, I will put some more of my software projects online, some of which may be of use to computational social scientists, as well as earlier work in the area of agent-oriented software engineering.

If not working you can find me swimming, making music and – admittedly hardly since moving to the Nordic climate – diving.