Eric Bonabeau

The founder and former chief scientific officer of Boston-based Icosystem Corporation, Eric Bonabeau, is one of the world’s leading experts on complex systems and distributed adaptive problem-solving. His book “Swarm of Intelligence” has been a scientific bestseller for seven years and whenever the inspiration for another bestseller, Michael Chrichton’s “Prey.”

His articles in the Harvard Business Review (Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Business Look, May 2001; Predicting the Unpredictable, March 2002; Not trusting your instinct, May 2003; The Dangers of the Age of Imitation, June 2004; You heard here first, February 2005; What is Luxury Without Variety?, February 2006) have all been exploring the limits of decisions in a complex, decentralized, and unpredictable human decision world.

Eric’s business experience includes years of research and development in the United States and European telecommunications and software companies. He sits on the advisory board of several Fortune 500 companies. 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 an R+D engineer with Cadence Design Systems France Telecom I+D, (in Lowell, MA, USA), and interval researcher 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 is a member of the editorial board of several scientific journals. In addition to Swarm of Intelligence and over a hundred scientific papers, Eric is the co-author of Self-Organization in Biological Systems (Princeton University Press), a best-selling biology textbook. He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Paris-Sud in France, and he spent several years as a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also an alumnus of the two top-tier French universities: Ecole Polytechnique and École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications