Fernando P. Santos

Associate Professor, University of Amsterdam.

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L5.11, Lab 42,

Science Park 900,

1098 XH Amsterdam

I am an Associate Professor at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam. I am part of the SIAS group, where I lead the Prosocial Dynamics Lab and I am a scientific lab manager of the Civic AI Lab.

My research lies at the interface of AI and Complex Systems: I study behavioral dynamics in systems of adaptive learning agents and aim at designing prosocial/fair AI (more info).

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton with Simon A. Levin, supported by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Fellowship. I completed my PhD in Computer Science and Engineering (2018) at Instituto Superior Técnico with Francisco C. Santos, Jorge M. Pacheco, and Ana Paiva; my work received the Victor Lesser Dissertation Award (2018), the APPIA Best Thesis in AI (2017-2018) and the INESC-ID PhD Student award (2018). I was selected for the AAAI-23 New Faculty Highlights program.

news

May 24, 2026 Looking very much forward to be at Cyprus for AAMAS 2026. If you are around make sure to pass by the talks from our lab! In the workshops:
  • Adaptive Learning Agents Workshop (Monday, May 25): Alex and Roman will present on Learning social norms of cooperation under limited observability
  • Doctoral Consortium (Monday, May 25): Roman will give a pitch and present a poster about his PhD topic: Reputation and Cooperation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
  • Agents for Social Impact: I’ll give a talk on The impact of AI in human cooperation, summarizing some of our lab’s recent work
  • Citizen-Centric MAS Workshop (Tuesday, May 26):
    • Alex is presenting on Biased social norms of cooperation in large language models
    • João will discuss his work on how Algorithmic Recommendations Alter the Spread of Competing Information
    • Mayesha will present her join work with Marta on The Role of Regulatory Institutions in Strategic Lending
    • Dimitris will present his most recent work on the challenges of generating realistic persoannnas with LLMs, as a means to test social media interventions.
  • Agents in Traffic and Transportation: I’ll give a talk on Games and Reinforcement Learning in Transportation Systems
Or the main conference:
  • Wednesday, May 27: Marta Couto will be presenting on Population Size Effects on Strategic Classification Dynamics (paper)
  • Wednesday, May 27: Dimitris Michailidis will present a poster on Inequality in Congestion Games with Learning Agents (paper)
  • Friday, May 29: Martin Smit will present on Fairness Dynamics in Digital Economy Platforms with Biased Ratings (paper)
See you there!
May 10, 2026 In Chicago, at NITMB, for a very exciting workshop on Evolutionary Games: Mathematical Theory and Biological Insights.
Feb 13, 2026 Dr. Dimitris Michailidis just defended his PhD! Fantastic work, presentation and defense! Many congratulations! (more info and full thesis here)
Jul 17, 2025 Very happy to be a keynote speaker at the 3rd International Conference on Evolutionary Game Theory and Artificial Intelligence, organized in Hangzhou, China.
May 19, 2025 Attending AAMAS 2025 in Detroit! Several talks by our group members:
  • Alex is presenting a Main Track paper on using Artificial Agents to mitigate the challenges on Indirect Reciprocity dealing with private reputations; also at the Doctoral Consortium and the C-MAS Workshop
  • Dimitris is presenting at the ALA Workshop his recent work on fairenss in congestion games; and a JAAMAS track paper (joint work with Mayesha)
  • Roman is presenting his MSc thesis work, completed at TU Delft!
  • Mayesha is presenting at the C-MAS Workshop and her JAAMAS Track paper
  • I’ll be presenting our work (led by Jennifer Renoux, Joana Campos and Filipa Correia!) on feedback strategies by artificial agents to improve human cooperation.
Exciting!!
Mar 2, 2025 Roman just started as a PhD student in our lab, investigating the prospects of using indirect reciprocity to enable cooperation among learning agents - Welcome, Roman!
Mar 1, 2025 Very honored to be elected as an ELLIS Scholar — thank you very much to the ELLIS unit Amsterdam! More info.
Oct 24, 2024 Just back from a fantastic ECAI, where Alex presented his work on Indirect Reciprocity in Hybrid Populations and Dimitris presented on Multi-objective RL applied to Public Transit Design. Well done! I’m also very happy with the Doctoral Consortium —- really rewarding to see so many commited PhD students and exciting ideas!
Sep 24, 2024 Travelling to the USA (Boston and Cambridge) — very excited to give a talk at the Network Science Institute and participate in the Building a Bigger and Better US conference at MIT Sloan!
May 1, 2024 May is time for AAMAS 2024! I’ll give a keynote talk at the Social Choice and Learning Algorithms Workshop, participate in the Doctoral Consortium Carreer Panel and present joint work with Martin. See you in Auckland!
Mar 21, 2024 Very excited to be awarded an NWO-M grant to study Cooperation and reputation in multi-agent reinforcement learning. More info via UvA and NWO.
Nov 13, 2023 I’m giving an invited talk at the Center for Mathematical Biology, University of Pennsilvanya.
Sep 5, 2023 I’ve been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to study the impacts of algorithmic recommendations on social dynamics, with project RE-LINK! We have 3 open PhD positions to work in this project! Check some news about the ERC StG results and the RE-LINK project by Técnico, UvA, Exame Informática and Público.
Aug 30, 2023 I will be an invited speaker in the 2023 Dutch NetSci Summer Symposium! More info.