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Francis is a research professor at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), where he directs the transdisciplinary research group on “Evolution, Complexity and Cognition“. He is affiliated with the Center “Leo Apostel” and the Department of Philosophy. He is an editor of the Principia Cybernetica Project, an international organization for the collaborative development of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy.
Having earned a PhD in mathematical physics he has been working at the VUB since 1982, first on the foundations of physics (quantum mechanics and relativity theory). The focus of his research then turned to the self-organization or evolution of complexity, which he studies from a cybernetic viewpoint.
The main focus of Francis’ research is now the evolution of complexity: how do higher levels of organization originate (metasystem transitions) and develop? How do systems self-organize, adapt and achieve some form of cognition? I have worked in particular on the development of collective knowledge and intelligence, and its application to the emerging intelligent web, or “global brain“.
He is using this evolutionary-cybernetic approach as a framework for the integration of ideas from different disciplines into an encompassing “world view“. This broad evolutionary view, together with its practical applications on advanced web systems, has helped him to develop a broad, but concrete vision on the future of the information society. Francis also teaches an introductory course (in Dutch) on this topic at the VUB. His lecture notes are being turned into a textbook, first in Dutch, then (with more technical detail) in English. He also teaches a more advanced course on Cognitive Systems (lecture notes available in English). He has several PhD students from diverse backgrounds working on related subjects.
As a true interdisciplinarian, Francis has moreover done research and published more than 100 papers about various subjects in various scientific disciplines, from mathematical physics, and computer support systems to humanistic psychology, including a) Collective Intelligence, and the global brain, b) Social Progress and the measurement of Happiness, c) Algorithms for Learning Webs, d) Foundations of Cybernetics and Systems Theory, e) Evolutionary Development of Social Systems, f) Memetics or mechanisms for cultural evolution, g) Formality/context-dependence in Linguistics, h) Psychology of Causal Attributions, i) Maslow’s theory of the Self-Actualizing Personality, j) Bootstrapping Knowledge Representations, k) Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and of Space-Time Structure, l) Gifted people and their problems.
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