The founder and Chief Scientist of Boston-based Icosystem Corporation, Eric Bonabeau is one of the world's leading experts in complex systems and distributed adaptive problem solving. His book Swarm Intelligence has been a scientific bestseller for eight years and provided the inspiration for another bestseller, Michael Chrichton's Prey. His articles in Harvard Business Review (Swarm Intelligence, May 2001; Predicting the Unpredictable, March 2002; Don't Trust Your Gut, May 2003; The Perils of the Imitation Age, June 2004; You Heard It Here First, February 2005; What Is Luxury Without Variety?, February 2006; The Two Faces of New Product Development, November 2007, to appear) and MIT Sloan Management Review (Understanding and Managing Complexity Risk, Summer 2007) have all been exploring the limits of human decision making in a complex, decentralized and unpredictable world.

Eric's commercial experience includes years of research and development in US and European telecommunications and software companies. He sits on the advisory board of a number of Fortune 500 corporations. Prior to his current position, Eric was the CEO of Eurobios, then a joint venture with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young applying the science of complex adaptive systems to business issues. He has been a research director with France Telecom R&D, an R&D engineer with Cadence Design Systems (in Lowell, MA, USA), and the Interval Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

Eric is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journals Advances in Complex Systems (World Scientific) and ACM Transactions on Adaptive and Autonomous Systems (ACM Press) and serves as a member of the editorial board of several scientific journals. In addition to Swarm Intelligence and more than one hundred scientific articles, Eric is the co-author of Self-Organization in Biological Systems (Princeton University Press), a best-selling biology textbook. He has a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Paris-Sud University in France, and is an alumnus of the two premier French universities: Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications.

Prior to joining Icosystem, Paolo was Chief Scientist at Artificial Life, a company that applied Natural Language Processing and Autonomous Agent Technology to a variety of Internet usage and navigation problems. He was also founder and CEO of Aliseo, Inc., a consultancy focused on technology transition between Italy and the US. Paolo began his career at Boston University, where he reached the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. He specialized in the application of neural networks to the control of mobile robots, and in the study of biological and machine vision.

Paolo is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research, Fuortes & Klingenstein fellowships from the Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratory, and a Sloan Fellowship in Neuroscience. He has authored more than 50 scientific publications and has given over 60 invited presentations internationally. Paolo holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics, an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Systems.