Management Team
Dr. Lex PAULSON (UM6P/Sciences Po-Paris)
Co-founder, Executive director & Professor
Mohcine Abad (UM6P)
Territorial Project Manager & Executive Master coordinator
Dr. Sanaa Lahlali (UM6P)
Senior Program Officer
Maha Kabbaj (UM6P)
Communication Business Partner
Maha KABBAJ (UM6P)
Maha is the Communication Lead at School of Collective Intelligence. She is responsible for creating, managing, and communicating content. With a bachelor degree in management within the Internatinal University of Rabat and a master degree in marketing, communications and business strategies at INSEEC Lyon, she worked first as a marketing manager in the flour industry. Then, she joined Masen, the group responsible for managing renewable energy in Morocco, as communication analyst.
She developed skills in project management, event organization, website creation, marketing strategies, internal & external communication.
Sanaa LAHLALI (UM6P)
Dr. Sanaa is the Senior Program Officer at School of Collective Intelligence where she designs and prepares CI training programs and provides academic support to the Research Director.
She holds a PhD in Physical Science and Engineering from Cadi Ayyad University and is a qualified Materials and Process Engineer. She previously worked as an adjunct Professor at Cadi Ayyad University and taught Physics and Chemistry at Cambridge International School.
Her research focuses on the development and characterization of nanomaterial for photovoltaic application in the field of renewable energy. She is currently exploring the application of CI methodology for science education in children.
Dr. Lex PAULSON (UM6P/Sciences Po-Paris)
Co-founder of the School of Collective Intelligence, Dr. Paulson has trained leaders in government and business in over 20 countries. A mobilization strategist for the campaigns of Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron, he studied political theory at Yale and Cambridge before earning his PhD at the Sorbonne. His work centers on leadership and democratic innovation.
“My work centers upon the design and facilitation of intelligent human systems, with a special focus on citizen consultations and small-group deliberation. Informed by antique political thought, in particular the design principles of Athenian and Roman political institutions, as well as the contemporary field of epistemic democracy, I have designed and accompanied a range of in-person and technology-assisted public consultations in the EU, Africa, and North America. I am interested in experimental methods to test the impact of narrative strategies and moral framing techniques on the efficacy of deliberations at small and large scales.”
Representative Publications :
- Paulson, L. (2019). Libera voluntas: the political origins of the free will argument in Cicero and Augustine, in Cicero’s Final Years Through the Ages(Leiden, publication forthcoming).
- Paulson, L. & Zacherzewski, A. (2017). Empowered: Achieving the best digital future for society, work, and democracy in Europe. Official report to the European Commission Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology.
- Paulson, L. (2016). Review of Sean McConnell, Philosophical Life in Cicero’s Letters. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, BMCR 2016.07.28.
- Paulson, L. (2014). Fostering peaceful and credible elections by enhancing the confidence of political parties and voters in the electoral process (Guinée-Conakry). Official report to the United Nations Development Program and European Commission.
- Paulson, L. (2014). A Painted Republic: the constitutional innovations of Cicero’s De Legibus. Etica & Politica XVI (Dec. 2014), pp.307-340.
Mohcine ABAD (UM6P)
Territorial Project Manager at the School of Collective Intelligence. Mohcine is a consultant in business law and holds a master’s degree in environment and sustainable development.
Graduated from Mohammed V University in Rabat, he started working at KenzArt Creation as a legal consultant and financial and administrative responsible. then as a legal consultant and analyst at Mundiapolis University. In parallel, he has developed his skills in working with civil society and human rights, particularly since 2008. He has experience in project management, and especially in field work in subjects such as: socio-economic integration, territorial and social development and impactful projects.
Mohcine is a recognized consultant for DAR AL MOUKAWIL of Attijari WAFA bank and also a recognized consultant in adult education and socio-economic reintegration for the Tangier Tetouan Al Hoceima Region Council
Samia Cherif D'ouezzane (UM6P/OCP)
Director of Advisory Practice
Abdoul Kafid TOKO KOUTOGUI
Assistant Project Manager& Africa partnership
Fatima ZAMBA
Assistant Project Manager
Abdoul Kafid TOKO KOUTOGUI
Abdoul kafid is an Assistant Project Manager& Africa partnership at SCI. He is part of the first cohort of the SCI Master program. Before joining the SCI he worked as a research assistant in social science and digital project management.
He has always been driven by a deep desire to solve his country’s social problems. This has led him to combine his knowledge of computer science and social science to conduct applied research related to African education, health, and agriculture problems. Now, his work focuses on Cognitive Science for public policy, and the use of computational social sciences for a better understanding of our society’s complex problems.
He also has a deeper interest in political science and leadership for west Africa.
Faculty members
Dr. Cathal O’Madagain (UM6P)
Assistant Professor and Scientific Director
Mark Klein (UM6P)
Affiliate professor
Dr. Emile Servan Schreiber (UM6P)
Affiliate professor
Dr. Fatima Ezzahra Benmarrakchi (UM6P)
Research & Education Fellow
Dr. FatimaZzahra BENMARRAKCHI (UM6P)
Dr FatimaEzzahra Benmarrakchi is a Research & Education Fellow at SCI . She received a PhD. in computer science from Chouaib Doukkali University. Her research focuses on how the use of technology can foster learning outcomes and improve cognitive and social skills for children with learning disabilities (e.g. Dyslexia) and Autism Spectrum Disorder.
In the SCI she is leading research on collaborative learning.
“My work is in the field of educational technology and special education, it focuses on how the use of ICT (Information and Communication technology) can improve learning. Exploring the potential benefits offered by ICT to support children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia. I have conducted a range of experimental research programs aimed at children with learning disabilities in order to developing interactive experiences that can motivate and help target learners.”
Representative Publications:
- Benmarrakchi, F., Kafi, J. E. & Elhore, A. (2016). Supporting dyslexic’s learning style preferences in adaptive virtual learning environment. in 2016 International Conference on Engineering MIS (ICEMIS) 1–6 (2016).
- Benmarrakchi, F., Kafi, J. E., Elhore, A. & Haie, S. (2016). Exploring the use of the ICT in supporting dyslexic students’ preferred learning styles : A preliminary evaluation. Educ. Inf. Technol. 1–19 (2016).
- Hammoumi, O. El, Benmarrakchi, F. Ouherrou,N., El Kafi, J. and El Hore, A. (2018). Emotion Recognition in E-Learning Systems. In 2018 6th International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (ICMCS), 1–6.
- Nihal, O., Elhammoumi, O. Benmarrakchi, F. and El Kafi,J. (2019). Comparative Study on Emotions Analysis from Facial Expressions in Children with and without Learning Disabilities in Virtual Learning Environment. Education and Information Technologies, January.
- Benmarrakchi F., Ouherrou N., Elhammoumi O., El Kafi J. (2019). An Innovative Approach to Involve Students with Learning Disabilities in Intelligent Learning Systems. In: Ezziyyani M. (eds) Advanced Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Development (AI2SD’2018). AI2SD 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 914. Springer, Cham.
- Elhammoumi O., Benmarrakchi F.E., Ouherrou N., Kafi J.E. (2020). The Use of NN to Detect Learning Styles of Children with Learning Disabilities in E-Learning System. In: Ezziyyani M. (eds) Advanced Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Development (AI2SD’2019). AI2SD 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1102. Springer, Cham
Dr. Cathal O’MADAGAIN (UM6P)
Scientific director of the School of Collective Intelligence, professor O’Madagain earned a PhD in philosophy at the University of Toronto and after that worked for 8 years as a research psychologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and the Ecole Superieure in Paris.
His work explores how human thought and knowledge depend on various kinds of social interaction. Current projects include work on the development of rationality in humans and great apes, and the role of reasons in the transmission of new technologies and ideas, which he is exploring with communities of farmers in rural Morocco.
My work explores the impact of social interaction on our cognitive lives. This encompasses issues in the philosophy of mind and language, social epistemology, and the philosophy of evolutionary biology and developmental psychology. I undertake purely theoretical philosophy, and also experimental work with children, adults and our nearest evolutionary cousins, the great apes.
My work can be thought of as three interconnected projects, investigating: the impact of social interaction on the development of cognition; the ways in which coordination with others augments our epistemic abilities; and the building blocks of language and thought.
Representative Publications
- Walmsley, J. and O‘Madagain, C. (Joint first authors). (in press).The Worst Motive Fallacy. Psychological Science.
- O‘Madagain, C. (in press). This is a Paper about Demonstratives. Philosophia.
- O‘Madagain, C. Kachel, G and Strickland, B. (2019). The Origin of Pointing: Evidence for the Touch Hypothesis. Science Advances: Vol. 5, no. 7, eaav2558, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav2558
- Koymen, B. O‘Madagain, C., Domberg, A. and Tomasello, M. (2019). Young children’s ability to produce valid and relevant counter-arguments. Child Development, 10.1111/cdev.13338
- Egré, P and O‘Madagain, C. (Joint first authors). (2019). Concept Utility. The Journal of Philosophy.
- O‘Madagain, C. and Tomasello, M. (Joint first authors). (2019). Joint Attention to Mental Contents and the Social Origin of Reasoning. Synthese, 10.1007/s11229-019-02327-1
Dr. Mark KLEIN (UM6P)
Dr. Mark Klein is a Professor in SCI as a research scientist at MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. His research is developing computer technologies that enable greater ‘collective intelligence’ in large groups faced with complex decisions.
“The goal of my research is to develop computer technologies that enable greater ‘collective intelligence’ in large groups faced with complex decisions. To do so, I draw from such fields as computer science/artificial intelligence, economics, sociology, operations research, and complexity science. My current projects focus on large-scale deliberation, crowdsourced idea filtering, and negotiation mechanisms for complex problems. I’ve also worked on computer-supported conflict management for collaborative design, design rationale capture, business process re-design, exception handling in workflow and multi-agent systems, and service discovery.”
Representative Publications
- Reyhan Aydoğan, Ivan Marsa-Maestre, Mark Klein, and Catholijn M. Jonker (2018). A Machine Learning Approach for Mechanism Selection in Complex Negotiations.
- Systems Science and Systems Engineering , 27:134–155.
- Spada, P., Iandoli, L., Quinto, I., Calabretta, R., & Klein, M. (2017). Argumentation vs Ideation in online political debate: evidence from an experiment of collective deliberation. New Media & Society.
- Klein, M., & Garca, A-C-B. (2015). High-Speed Idea Filtering With the Bag of Lemons. Decision Support Systems, 78(C):39-50.
- Marsa-Maestre, I., Klein, M., Jonker, C. M., Lopez-Carmona, M. A., & Aydogan, R. (2014). From Problems to Protocols: Towards a Negotiation Handbook. Decision Support Systems, 60:39-54.
- Klein, M. (2012). Enabling Large-Scale Deliberation Using Attention-Mediation Metrics. Computer-Supported Collaborative Work. 21(4):449-473
- Bernstein, A., M. Klein and T. Malone .(2012). Programming the Global Brain. Communications of the ACM 55(5).
Dr. Emile SERVAN-SCHREIBER (UM6P)
Dr. Emile Servan-Schreiber is an affiliate professor at SCI and a founding director of Hypermind, a leading prediction-markets company since 2000. His research and practice focus on applying crowd wisdom to forecasting and prioritization. He has participated in several large-scale research programs of the U.S. (IARPA) on crowd-based forecasting of geopolitical events. He earned a Ph.D in cognitive psychology at Carnegie Mellon (1991). His latest book is Supercollectif (Fayard, 2018).
“I research ways to exploit crowd wisdom, through prediction markets and related technologies, to make organizations smarter through more accurate forecasting, richer innovation, and better alignment. The research field covers at least (a) the development of new aggregation algorithms building on the existing state of the art, (b) the testing/training of individuals and crowds to push the forecasting envelope, (c) the efficient combination of collective intelligence and artificial intelligence.”
Representative Publications
- Servan-Schreiber, E. (2018). Supercollectif – La nouvelle puissance de nos intelligences. Fayard, Paris.
- Servan-Schreiber, E. (2017). Debunking Three Myths About Crowd-Based Forecasting. Collective Intelligence 2017, NYU Tandon.
- Atanasov, P., Rescober, P., Stone, E., Swift, S., Servan-Schreiber, E., Tetlock, P., Ungar, L., & Mellers, B. (2016). Distilling the Wisdom of Crowds: Prediction markets vs. Prediction Polls. Management Science, Articles in Advance, pp. 1-16.
- Servan-Schreiber, E., & Atanasov, P. (2016). Hypermind vs Big Data : Collective Intelligence Still Dominates Electoral Forecasting. Collective Intelligence 2015, Santa Clara.
- Servan-Schreiber, E. (2012). Prediction Markets: Trading Uncertainty for Collective Wisdom. In Collective Wisdom – Landemore, H., & Elster, J. (Eds). Cambridge University Press.
- Servan-Schreiber, E., Wolfers, J., Pennock, D., & Galebach, B. (2004). Prediciton Markets: Does Money Matter? Electronic Markets, 14(3): 243-251.
James Winters (UM6P)
Assistant professor
Florencia Devoto
Affiliate professor
Sarah Alami
Assistant professor
Jose Segovia Martins
Research & Education fellow
Florencia DEVOTO (UM6P)
Dr Florencia is an affiliate professor at the School of Collective Intelligence. She undertakes experimental work in the field of development economics. She holds a PhD from the Paris School of Economics and an MPA/International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School.
“My research focuses on measuring the impacts of tools and policies on the decisions of poor households in developing countries and how these decisions may differ from those predicted by the classical economic theory. I conduct randomized control trials to explore a variety of questions in the areas of education, microfinance, female labor force participation and access to water. By conducting this work, I intend to contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms through which policies can help alleviating poverty.”
Representative Publications
- Benhassine, N., Devoto, F., Duflo, E., Dupas, P., & Pouliquen, V. (2015). Turning a Shove into a Nudge? A “Labeled Cash Transfer” for Education. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 7(3), 86–125.
- Crépon, B., Devoto, F., Duflo, E., & Parienté, W. (2015). Estimating the Impact of Microcredit on Those Who Take It Up: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Morocco. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 7(1), 123–150.
- Devoto, F., Duflo, E., Dupas, P., Parienté, W., & Pons, V. (2012). Happiness on Tap: Piped Water Adoption in Urban Morocco.American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 4(4), 68–99.
- Zwane, A. P., Zinman, J., Dusen, E. V., Pariente, W., Null, C., Miguel, E., Kremer, M., Karlan, D. S., Hornbeck, R., Giné, X., Duflo, E., Devoto, F., Crepon, B., & Banerjee, A. (2011). Being surveyed can change later behavior and related parameter estimates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(5), 1821–1826.
Sarah ALAMI (UM6P)
Dr. Sarah is a professor at the School of Collective Intelligence. She is an anthropologist and a biodemographer who conducts fieldwork with economically transitioning populations in Southeast Morocco and lowland Bolivia.
She holds an MA and a PhD in Anthropology from the university of California, Santa Barbara. Sarah studies a number of different topics relating to behavior and health.
Her current research projects are in one or more of the following areas:
- Kinship and marriage systems
- Evolution of human sociality and intergroup relationships
- Gender , gender norms and leadership
- Health, lifestyle change, and evolutionary demography
Jose Segovia MARTINS
Dr Jose is a Research & Education Fellow at SCI . He completed my PhD in Cognitive Science and Language at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
“My scientific work concerns the evolution of collective behaviour. I use mathematical and computational models, as well as experiments and data science, to study the interaction between cognition, behaviour and social organisation, with a perspective rooted in cultural evolution and complex systems. My research interests span the domains of social cognition, behavioural economics, decision theory, computational biology and language evolution. I am interested in questions such as how social conventions emerge in the presence and absence of institutional incentives, what special features of human social learning and innovation enable cumulative cultural evolution, how different aggregation rules shape collective outcomes such as the degree of consensus and polarisation in a society, or how social dynamics and norms interfere with the quality of scientific production. These models, in combination with empirical verification and validation, provide a method to explore possible ways of estimating the economic and social trade-offs involved in preserving cultural diversity, addressing inequalities and improving governance.”
Representative Publications
- Segovia-Martin, J. preprint 2022. Modelling the dynamics of cross-border ideological competition. ArXiv. Subjects: Dynamical Systems (math.DS).
- Walker, B., Segovia Martín, J., Tamariz, M., & Fay, N. (2021). Maintenance of prior behaviour can enhance cultural selection. Scientific reports, 11(1), 1-9.
- Segovia-Martín, J., & Tamariz, M. (2021). Synchronising institutions and value systems: A model of opinion dynamics mediated by proportional representation. PLoS ONE.
- Segovia-Martín, J. (2021). Synchronising the emergence of institutions and value systems. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43..
- Segovia-Martín, J., & Tamariz, M. (2021, April 14). Synchronising institutions and value systems: a model of opinion dynamics mediated by proportional representation.
- Segovia-Martín, J., Walker, B., Fay, N., & Tamariz, M. (2020). Network connectivity dynamics, cognitive biases and the evolution of cultural diversity in round-robin interactive micro-societies.Cognitive Science.
- Segovia-Martín, J., & Tamariz, M. (2020). Testing early and late connectivity dynamics in the lab: an experiment using 4-agent micro-societies.PsyArXiv
Dr. James WINTERS (UM6P)
Dr Winters is an Assistant Professor at the School of Collective Intelligence working in the domains of cognitive science, cultural evolution, and linguistics. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and earned his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. His current research employs a variety of methodological tools (computational, statistical, and experimental) to investigate exploration-exploitation dynamics in cumulative cultural evolution.
“Why are humans the only species capable of open-ended, cumulative problem solving? How did this capacity evolve and become manifest in our language, technology, and culture? My research seeks to address such questions by drawing on theoretical and methodological approaches from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and complexity science, with the explicit aim of capturing the relationship between individual-level processes and population-level patterns.”
Representative Publications
- Winters, J. (2019). Escaping optimization traps: The role of cultural adaptation and cultural exaptation in facilitating open-ended cumulative culture. Palgrave Communications, 5: 149.
- Winters, J., & Morin, O. (2019). From context to code: Information transfer constrains the emergence of graphic codes. Cognitive Science, 43(3): e12722.
- Müller, T.F., & Winters, J. (2018). Compression in cultural evolution: Homogeneity and structure in the emergence and evolution of a large-scale online collaborative art project. PLoS One, 13(9): e0202019.
- Winters, J., Kirby, S., & Smith, K. (2018). Contextual predictability shapes signal autonomy. Cognition, 176:15-30.
- Winters, J., Kirby, S., & Smith, K. (2015). Languages adapt to their contextual niche. Language and Cognition, 7(3): 415-449.
- Roberts, S. G., & Winters, J. (2013). Linguistic diversity and traffic accidents: Lessons from statistical studies of cultural traits. PLoS One, 8(8): e70902.