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MAGICS' Mission: Modern engineered systems are increasingly connected, with complex interactions among social and technical aspects, both during the design process and after fielding. While traditional engineering design has focused on designing an optimal technical artifact, there is an increasing recognition that social and organizational aspects of how designers collaborate and create, and how systems co-evolve with the human and built environments through use, are equally important drivers of value. Additionally, the rise of new sources of data and increased availability thereof creates many opportunities to extend design research into the sociotechnical realm.
MAGICS Lab was founded in 2019, evolving from CENS Lab (Complex Evolving Networked Systems) which was active between 2011-2018. In MAGICS Lab, we take a sociotechnical perspective towards the design and governance of complex engineering systems, bringing together elements of technical design, models of human behavior, and policy and regulation perspectives.
MAGICS Lab News
MAGICS Lab News
2025
Media Mention: Our paper on strategic behavior of LLM agents was covered by Scientific American article on AI alignment.
New Preprint: The Shifting Dynamics of Online Knowledge Platforms and the Implications for Generative AI Sustainability [Negin Maddah, Babak Heydari]. (LinkedIn Summary)
New Preprint: Cultivating theory of mind in smaller LLMs for strategic multi-agent behavior. (LinkedIn Summary). [Nunzio Lore, Sepehr Ilami, Babak Heydari, Under Review].
New Preprint: Resource Governance in Networked Systems via Integrated Variational Autoencoders and Reinforcement Learning [Qiliang Chen, Babak Heydari; R&R at ASME JMD] (LinkedIn Summary)
2024
New NSF Grant: Professor Heydari is a PI of a new $1M NSF IHBEM project on integrating group-level human behavior into epidemic modeling
New publication: Strategic Behavior of Large Language Models (Nunzio Lore, Babak Heydari). See the LinkedIn post for a summary of the paper.
New publications in IEEE Transactions of Computational Social Systems (Negin Maddah & Babak Heydari). (Arxiv Version)
PhD student, Negin Maddah, gave a plenary presentation on evolution of platform-driven collaborations at IC2S2 at Penn. Our lab had three papers total (plenary acceptance rate < 3%)
Prof. Heydari presented on team adaptation to complexity at ACM Collective Intelligence Conference.
New Paper on models of decentralized recovery in resilient systems, published at RESS (IF=9.4).
Prof. Heydari participated in the final review of ETH-Singapore Future Resilient Systems in January 11-13, charing the Scientific Advisory Committee.
New Paper Accepted to the Systems Engineering Journal, titled "The SoS Conductor: Orchestrating Resources with Iterative Agent-Based Reinforcement Learning".
2023
New Paper alert: Strategic Behaviors of Large Language Models.
Congratulations to Soum for successfully defending his PhD defense.
Funding Alert: MAGICS Lab is a part of the new NSF NRT Grant on Platform Systems.
Congratulations to Qingtao for successfully defending his PhD defense.
New Book Alert: ReEngineering the Sharing Economy, Cambridge University Press.
New paper in Systems Engineering Journal on dynamics of design teams and industry lifecycle.
Paper accepted for oral presentation at IC2S2 in Denmark on mobility networks and forecasting.
Paper accepted for oral presentation at ICED 2023.
2022
New paper in Nature Computational Science on social network drivers of the success of national covid policies.
New Paper @ JMD titled Dynamic Resource Allocation in Systems-of-Systems Using a Heuristic-Based Interpretable Deep Reinforcement Learning.
Paper accepted to Strategic Management Soceity Conference (SMS 2022) in London.
Congratulations to Qingtao Cao for giving an oral presentation @ IC2S2 2022
New Paper @ Scientific Data titled A multisource database tracking the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the communities of Boston.
Congratulations Qingtao and Soum for receiving the college of engineering awards in research and teaching.
Prof. Heydari received the COE faculty fellow award.
New Lab member: Welcome Negin Maddah, Gabriele Ansaldo, and Nunzio Lore.
2021
New Project: Prof. Heydari is a Co-PI of an IARPA project on creating predictive models of the pandemic using mobility data.
Three papers from MAGICS lab are accepted for oral presentation at CESUN2021.
New Paper and Media Reports: Our paper on the effect of short-term rentals on the social organization of neighborhoods is now published in PloS ONE. The paper was covered by several media channels, including Euronews, Wired, NPR, Boston Globe, BusinessInsider, and Dailymail. Boston.Com in particular published a comprehensive story on the findings.
Congratulations to Soum and Qiliang for successfully passing their oral qualifying exam in Spring 2021.
COVID-19 Social Distancing Paper Published in the Public Health Reports. Original Version of the paper with more results. Media Coverage. STAT (Link), World Economic Forum (Link), Northeastern News (Link). We also thank the Surgeon General of the United States for featuring our study on Twitter.
Congratulations to Qiliang Chen for publishing a paper on using Modularity in Reinforcement Learning in the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design.
2020
Prof. Heydari is appointed as the chair of the scientific advisory committee for ETH-Singapore Future Resilient Systems Center.
Congratulations to Qingtao Cao on successfully passing his PhD proposal defense.
Soumyakant Padhee and Qingtao Cao gave two presentations at INFORMS 2020.
Prof. Heydari is elected as the chair of the Council of Engineering Systems Universities (CESUN).
Our paper on the link between Airbnb and Crime was presented at IC2S2 2020.
Prof. Heydari is appointed as an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design.
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