Hi -- I'm Simon Plakolb
this is my personal website
BEHAVIOUR.space

On this website you'll find information about my professional adventures and some leisure activities. Both involve writing and programming.

I am a complex systems scientist currently practicing epidemiology at the University of Oslo where I work on Digital Twins for epidemiology. My work focuses on the systemic interplay between the social, the artificial and the natural through the lens of computer models.

I obtained my PhD in environmental systems science at the University of Graz studying decision support systems in urban transport policy making. There, my research focused on systems scientific aspects, distilling the core constituents of urban congestion formation to obtain a GPU parallelized urban traffic model. I also turned to the microscopic scale to study sustainable and resilient decision-making algorithms at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). During my PostDoc at the Graz Schumpeter Centre (GSC) I turned to epidemiology. I studied the structure of phylogenetic trees and their interdependence with socio-economic factors.

In the course I've built a reasonable expertise on modeling systemic phenomena with a wide array of methods stretching from traditional ordinary differential equations to graph theoretical approaches and agent-based modeling. The variety in my toolbox allows me to apply methods as I see them applicable to research questions and helps me in my strive to stay methodologically agnostic.

It is this agnosticism that leads me to constantly question the methods I apply. It is the source of my further research interests in the theoretical and practical implications of interactionist sociology and the breakdown of cooperation in agent-based models.

In my free time I enjoy endurance sports (mostly cycling, some running and hiking), writing and reading. If I find the time I also like to give back to the community by contributing to open source repositories.

You can view my publication record here.

Recent Blog Posts

Occasionally I sit down and finish one of many blog post drafts. The most recent of which are listed here for your convenience:

If you like the read find more here.

For the curious

You may wonder why this site is hosted under this particular URL. NetLogo is a program which significantly contributed to my field of systems science. Its sensitivity analysis mode is called "behavior space". Unfortunately, the American spelled URL came with a premium price tag, so here we are at BEHAVIOUR.space.