Francis Heylighen: home page

Address:: Center "Leo Apostel", Vrije Universiteit Brussel,
Krijgskundestraat 33, B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
(map and directions)
Phone:: +32-2-640 67 37
Fax:: +32-2-644 07 44
Email:: fheyligh at vub.ac.be (Francis Heylighen)
(replace " at " by "@")

If you wish to contact me, please note that I prefer email to fax, phone or letter. However, take into account that I get lots of messages. Therefore I may not be able to reply soon. To make sure your message would pass through my spam filters and be duly noticed, please use a clear subject and include my full name.

While I have pages on the social networks Facebook, LinkedIn and Academia, I do not actively maintain these pages. I also have the policy to link only to people I really know, so don't be surprised if your kind invitation to become a "friend" or "contact" on such a network is not accepted...

I am a research professor at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), where I direct the transdisciplinary research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition" and the Global Brain Institute, which is being established. I am affiliated with the Center "Leo Apostel" and the Department of Philosophy. I am an editor of the Principia Cybernetica Project, an international organization for the collaborative development of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy (which is now essentially dormant after the death of its founder, Valentin Turchin).

The main focus of my research is the evolution of complexity: how do higher forms of organization originate and develop? How do systems self-organize, adapt and achieve some form of cognition? I have worked in particular on the development of collective intelligence or distributed cognition, and its application to the emerging "global brain". More recently, I have been looking at how individual agents tackle complex challenges via action, exploration, and learning.

I use this evolutionary-cybernetic approach as a framework for the integration of ideas from different disciplines into an encompassing "world view". This broad evolutionary view, together with its practical applications on advanced web systems, has helped me to develop a broad, but concrete vision on the future of the information society. I also teach an introductory course (in Dutch) on this topic at the VUB. My lecture notes are being turned into a textbook, first in Dutch, then (with more technical detail) in English. I also teach a more advanced course on Cognitive Systems (lecture notes available in English). I have several PhD students from diverse backgrounds working on related subjects.

As a true interdisciplinarian, I have moreover done research and published papers about various subjects in various scientific disciplines, from mathematical physics, and computer support systems to humanistic psychology, including:

Collective Intelligence, and the global brain
Social Progress and the measurement of Happiness (with Jan Bernheim)
Algorithms for Learning Webs (with Johan Bollen)
Foundations of Cybernetics and Systems Theory (with Cliff Joslyn and Valentin Turchin)
Evolutionary Development of Social Systems (with the famous methodologist Donald T. Campbell)
Memetics or mechanisms for cultural evolution
Formality/context-dependence in Linguistics (with Jean-Marc Dewaele)
Maslow's theory of the Self-Actualizing Personality
Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and of Space-Time Structure (see also my PhD. Thesis)
Gifted people and their problems (for those who recognize themselves in these traits)

Publications

Check my list of more than 100 publications for more details about my work (including downloadable versions of most of my papers). To find my most cited publications and the papers that cite them, here is Google's

numerical analysis of my citations, including my H-index (32: getting better and better...). (Microsoft Academic Search produced a

more limited coverage of my publications and citations.)

The most recent (unpublished work) can be found in our ECCO working papers archive.

A little more about myself

For a more detailed, formal description of my activities, check my biographical sketch or my (rather outdated) Curriculum Vitae. As an amateur, I have also produced some artwork (photography and painting) and poetry. To get an idea of my character, check my personality profile according to the "Big Five" psychological dimensions, and

my Myers-Briggs personality type. For an idea of my tastes, here is a

Youtube playlist of music I like. I am an enthusiastic adept of the paleolithic lifestyle: maximizing health and happiness by living more like our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

If you would like to see me in action, here are some videos:

an interview where I explain why I find self-organization so fascinating (held at the Lakeside Labs in Klagenfurt, Austria, on a hot 2009 summer workshop),
a talk I gave on "The Problem of Coordination in Self-organizing Systems" at the Lakeside Research Days 2010
a presentation on stigmergy in digital ecosystems (at a 2007 conference at the European Commission in Brussels)

If you're curious how others see me, you can find references to my work on other web pages, such as an entry on me in Wikipedia, a satirical interview in "Wired",the list of "Great Thinkers and Visionaries on the Net", "Francis Heylighen: pioneer of the global brain" by Ben Goertzel, or a rather sensationalist feature article in New Scientist.