The recent September 2017, magnitude 7.1, central Mexico earthquake that caused 370 casualties reminds us that earthquakes are among the most dramatic natural disasters worldwide. Causal physical processes are not instantaneous and laboratory and numerical experiments predict that earthquakes should be preceded by a detectable slow preparation phase. Despite considerable efforts, however, robust geophysical precursors have not yet been observed before damaging earthquakes. My FaultScan project will revolutionize our ability to directly observe transient deformation within the core of active faults and provide unprecedented accuracy in the detection of earthquake precursors. My ambition is to develop a new, noise-based, high resolution, seismic monitoring approach. I intend to grasp the opportunity of a recent step change in seismic instrumentation and data processing capabilities to achieve a dream for seismologists: reproduce repeatable, daily, virtual seismic sources that can probe the core of active faults at seismogenic depths using only passive seismic records. I plan to target the San Jacinto Fault (a branch of the San Andreas Fault system) that is currently believed to pose one of the largest seismic risks in California. It is an ideal fault for this project because it is very active, already extensively studied and easily accessible for the pilot field data acquisition work. This project is in collaboration with the Univ. of South. California, the Univ. of Cal. San Diego and specialists in earthquake mechanics and will include earthquake preparation processes and seismic modeling that will guide us for our long-term (3 years), breakthrough, passive seismic experiment and further data analysis and interpretation. I strongly believe that this project has a very high potential for providing fundamental results on the physics of earthquakes and faults and that it will have a major impact on earthquake prediction worldwide in the near future.

Cooperation is essential for the functioning of the economy and society. Thus, with inappropriate mechanisms to harness self-interest by aligning it with the common good, the outcome of social and economic interaction can be bleak and even catastrophic. Recent advances in computer technology lead to radical innovation in market design and trading strategies. This creates both, new challenges and exciting opportunities for “engineering cooperation”. This project uses the economic engineering approach (as advocated by Alvin Roth) to address some of the most pressing cooperation problems of modern markets and societies. I propose three work packages, each using innovative experimental methods and (behavioral) game theory in order to address a specific challenge: The first one studies the design of electronic reputation mechanisms that promote cooperation in the digital world. Previous research has shown that mechanisms to promote trust on the Internet are flawed. Yet, there is little empirical and normative guidance on how to repair these systems, and engineer better ones. The second studies the design of mechanisms that avoid arms races for speed in real-time financial and electricity market trading. Traders use algorithmic sniping strategies, even when they are collectively wasteful and seriously threatening market liquidity and stability. Yet, little is known about the robust properties of alternative market designs to eliminate sniping. The third one studies how to design modern markets that align with ethical considerations. People sometimes have a distaste for certain kinds of modern transactions, such as reciprocal kidney exchange and buying pollution rights. Yet, little is known about the underlying nature and robustness of this distaste. My project will generate important knowledge to improve the functioning of modern markets, and at the same time open new horizons in the sciences of cooperation and of “behavioral economic engineering”.

Raising co-creativity in cyber-human musicianship Digital cultures are increasingly pushing forward a deep interweaving between human creativity and autonomous computation capabilities of surrounding environments, modeling joint human-machine action into new forms of shared reality involving "symbiotic interactions”. In the artistic, cultural or educative fields, co-creativity between humans and machines will bring about the emergence of distributed information structures, creating new performative situations with mixed artificial and human agents. This will disrupt known cultural orders and significantly impact human development. Thanks to the computation of semantic structures from physical and human signals, combined with (deep or statistical) generative learning of symbolic representations, we are beginning to comprehend the dynamics of cooperation (or conflicts) inherent to cyber-human bundles. To this end the REACH project aims at understanding, modeling, and developing musical co-creativity between humans and machines through improvised interactions, allowing musicians of any level of training to develop their skills and expand their individual and social creative potential. Indeed, improvisation is at the very heart of all human interactions, and music is a fertile ground for developing models and tools of creativity that can be generalized to other activities, as in music the constraints are among the strongest to conduct cooperative behaviors that come together into highly integrated courses of actions. REACH will study shared musicianship occurring at the intersection of the physical, human and digital spheres as an archetype of distributed (natural / artificial) intelligence, and will produce models and tools as vehicles to better understand and foster human creativity in a context where it becomes more and more intertwined with computation.