Paul Bourgine is the honorary director of RNSC, the French National Network of Complex Systems, former director of the CREA laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique, and founder of the Complex Systems Institute, Paris. He is also a co-founder of the CECOIA conferences in economics and artificial intelligence (1986), the ECAL conferences in artificial life (1990), the ECCE conferences in cognitive economics (2004) and the ECCS conferences in complex systems science (2005).