Blas Kolic

Biography

Blas is a postdoctoral fellow at IMDEA Networks and IBiDat Institute at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His research draws from dynamical systems, complex systems, network science, machine learning, and statistics. It focuses, on the one hand, on studying the behavior and evolution of norms and opinions in social networks and, on the other hand, on estimating the latent states of statistical and agent-based models based on aggregate observations. Lately, he has drawn interest in the interpretability and fairness of machine learning models and in recursive incentive mechanisms for task completions in social networks. Blas has a DPhil in Mathematics from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Doyne Farmer, where he formed part of the Complexity Economics group of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. He has also worked with the World Bank Group as a data analyst and participated in numerous conferences, seminars, and competitions. Blas did his undergraduate studies in Physics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico. Besides his academic career, he is passionate about music. He is collaborating with INET to develop methods to infer the latent states of agent-based models using data assimilation techniques.