Francis Heylighen

In the 2007 article "The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society" Heylighen gave a detailed exposition of the superorganism/global brain view of society, and an examination of the underlying evolutionary mechanisms, with applications to the ongoing and future developments in a globalizing world. Presently, he is developing a detailed mathematical and simulation model of the global brain, together with his collaborators in the Global Brain Institute.

Heylighen is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, and a member of the Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems of the World Economic Forum. His biography has been listed since 2002 in Marquis Who's Who in the world. In 2015, he received an "Outstanding Technology Contribution Award" from the Web Intelligence Consortium, for his research on the Global Brain.

In 1996, Heylighen founded the "Global Brain Group", an international discussion forum that groups most of the scientists who have worked on the concept of emergent Internet intelligence. Together with his PhD student Johan Bollen, Heylighen was the first to propose algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a self-organizing, learning network that exhibits collective intelligence, i.e. a Global brain.

Together with Cliff Joslyn and the late Valentin Turchin, Heylighen is a founding editor of the Principia Cybernetica Project, which is devoted to the collaborative development of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy. He created its website, the Principia Cybernetica Web, in 1993, as one of the first complex webs in the world. It is still viewed as one of the most important sites on cybernetics, systems theory and related approaches.

In 1989 Valentin Turchin and Cliff Joslyn founded the Principia Cybernetica Project, and Heylighen joined a year later. In 1993 he created the project's encyclopedic site, one of the first complex websites in the world. In 1996, Heylighen founded the "Global Brain Group", an international discussion forum that provides a working platform for most of the scientists who have worked on the concept of emergent Internet intelligence. Heylighen was also one of the founders and former editor of the Journal of Memetics which ceased publication in 2008.

In 1983 he started working as a researcher for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (NFWO). In 1994 he became a tenured researcher at the NFWO and in 2001 a research professor at the VUB. Since 1995 he has been affiliated with the VUB's Center Leo Apostel for interdisciplinary studies. In 2004 he created the ECCO research group which he presently directs. Thanks to a grant from a private sponsor, in 2012 he additionally founded the Global Brain Institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, becoming its first director.

Francis Paul Heylighen (born 1960) is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels), where he directs the transdisciplinary research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition" and the Global Brain Institute. He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. He is also known, albeit to a lesser extent, for his work on gifted people and their problems.

Francis Heylighen was born on September 27, 1960 in Vilvoorde, Belgium. He received his high school education from the "Koninklijk Atheneum Pitzemburg" in Mechelen, in the section Latin-Mathematics. He received his MSc in mathematical physics in 1982 from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where he also received his PhD Summa cum Laude in Sciences in 1987 for his thesis, published in 1990, as "Representation and Change. A Metarepresentational Framework for the Foundations of Physical and Cognitive Science."