Simon pursues a thoroughly multi-disciplinary research agenda as a computational and complexity scientist.
In Economics, he is thematically interested in technology, innovation and non-equilibrium economics. Largely he uses computational and data science techniques to study socio-economic, biological, or physical phenomena. He has worked on diverse complex systems applications such as evolutionary models of joint-intentionality, finite-state automata models of perpetually novelty, self-organisation in polymer films, complex neural regulation of endurance pacing, and cellular automata models of tumor progression. He also has a strong interest in networks and data science, including big data analysis and visualisation. Additionally, he has brought complexity thinking to sustainable development through his educational activities.
Simon is a founding member of SoDa Laboratories, an empirical research laboratory in the Monash Business School. SoDa Labs applies new tools from data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and beyond to answer social science questions using alternative and big data. Simon is also co-founder and current Director of the Monash IP Observatory, an internet measurement platform that takes over 3 billion measurements a day of the activity and quality of the internet all over the world. He has pioneered aggregation, visualisation and anomaly detection techniques which see the Observatory's data in use by journalists, war-crimes investigators, human rights organisations, and the United Nations.