By Mario Paolucci
This is the “header piece” for a short series on those who have been awarded the “Rosaria Conte Outstanding Award for Social Simulation” awarded by the European Social Simulation Association every two years. It makes no sense to describe those who have got this award without information about the person which it is named after, so this is about her.
Rosaria Conte was one of the first researchers in Europe to recognize and champion agent-based social simulation. She became a leader of what would later become the ESSA community in the 1990s, chairing the 1997 ICCS&SS – First International Conference on Computer Simulation and the Social Sciences in Cortona, Italy, and co-editing with Nigel Gilbert the book Artificial Societies (Gilbert & Conte, 1995). With her unique approach, her open approach to interdisciplinarity, and her charisma, she inspired and united a generation of researchers who still pursue her scientific endeavour.
Known as a relentless advocate for cognitive agents in the agent-based modeling community, Conte stood firmly against the keep-it-simple principle. Instead, she argued that plausible agents—those capable of explaining complex social phenomena where immergence (Castelfranchi, 1998; Conte et al., 2009) is as critical as emergence—require explicit, theory-backed representations of cognitive artifacts (Conte & Paolucci, 2011).
Born in Foggia, Italy, Rosaria graduated in philosophy at the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1976, to later join the Italian National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR). In the ‘90s, she founded and directed the Laboratory of Agent-Based Social Simulation (LABSS) at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC-CNR). Under her leadership, LABSS became an internationally renowned hub for research on agent-based modeling and social simulation. Conte’s work at LABSS focused on the development of computational models to study complex social phenomena, including cooperation, reputation, and social norms.
Influenced by collaborators such as Cristiano Castelfranchi and Domenico Parisi, whose guidance helped shape her studies of social behavior through computational models, she proposed the integration of cognitive and social theories into agent-based models. Unlike approaches that treated agents as simple rule-followers, Rosaria emphasized the importance of incorporating cognitive and emotional processes into simulations. Her 1995 book, Cognitive and Social Action (Conte & Castelfranchi, 1995), became a landmark text in the field. The book employed their characteristic pre-formal approach—using logic formulas in order to illustrate relationships between concepts, without a fully developed system of postulates or theorem-proving tools. The reason for this approach was, as they noted, that “formalism sometimes disrupts implicit knowledge and theories” (p. 14). The ideas in the book, together with her attention to the dependance relations between agents (Sichman et al., 1998) would go on to inspire Rosaria’s approach to simulation throughout her career.
Rosaria’s research extended to the study of reputation and social norms. For reputation (Conte & Paolucci, 2002), an attempt to create a specific, cognitive-based model has been made with the Repage approach (Sabater et al., 2006). Regarding social norms (Andrighetto et al., 2007), she explored how norms emerge, spread, and influence individual and collective behavior. This work had practical implications for a range of fields, including organizational behavior, policy design, and conflict resolution. She had a key role in the largest recent attempt to create a center for complexity and social sciences, the FuturICT project (Conte et al., 2012).
Rosaria Conte held several leadership positions. She served as President of the European Social Simulation Society (ESSA) from 2010 to 2012. Additionally, she was President of the Italian Cognitive Science Association (AISC) from 2008 to 2009, member of the Italian Bioethics Committee (CNB) from 2013 to 2016, and Vice President of the Italian CNR Scientific Council.
You can watch an interview with Rosaria about FuturICT here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghgzt5zgGP8
References
Andrighetto, G., Campenni, M., Conte, R., & Paolucci, M. (2007). On the immergence of norms: A normative agent architecture. Proceedings of AAAI Symposium, Social and Organizational Aspects of Intelligence. http://www.aaai.org/Library/Symposia/Fall/fs07-04.php
Castelfranchi, C. (1998). Simulating with Cognitive Agents: The Importance of Cognitive Emergence. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems and Agent-Based Simulation, 26–44. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=665578
Conte, R., Andrighetto, G., & Campennì, M. (2009). The Immergence of Norms in Agent Worlds. In H. Aldewereld, V. Dignum, & G. Picard (Eds.), Engineering Societies in the Agents World X< (pp. 1–14). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10203-5_1
Conte, R., & Castelfranchi, C. (1995). Cognitive Social Action. London: UCL Press.
Conte, R., Gilbert, N., Bonelli, G., Cioffi-Revilla, C., Deffuant, G., Kertesz, J., Loreto, V., Moat, S., Nadal, J.-P., Sanchez, A., Nowak, A., Flache, A., San Miguel, M., & Helbing, D. (2012). Manifesto of computational social science. The European Physical Journal Special Topics, 214(1), 325–346. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01697-8
Conte, R., & Paolucci, M. (2002). Reputation in Artificial Societies—Social Beliefs for Social Order. Springer. https://iris.unibs.it/retrieve/ddc633e2-a83d-4e2e-e053-3705fe0a4c80/Review%20of%20Conte%2C%20Rosaria%20and%20Paolucci%2C%20Mario_%20Reputation%20in%20Artificial%20Socie.pdf
Conte, R., & Paolucci, M. (2011). On Agent Based Modelling and Computational Social Science. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00668
Gilbert, N., & Conte, R. (Eds.). (1995). Artificial Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Life. Taylor & Francis, Inc. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/24305/1005826.pdf
Sabater, J., Paolucci, M., & Conte, R. (2006). Repage: REPutation and ImAGE Among Limited Autonomous Partners. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 9<(2). http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/9/2/3.html
Sichman, J. S., Conte, R., Demazeau, Y., & Castelfranchi, C. (1998). A social reasoning mechanism based on dependence networks. 416–420.
Paolucci, M. (2023) Rosaria Conte (1952-2016). Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 11 Feb 2023. https://rofasss.org/2025/02/11/rosariaconte/
© The authors under the Creative Commons’ Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) Licence (v4.0)
Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 
See also the Wikipedia entry on her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosaria_Conte
Google summary of her citations https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=bCZjUyAAAAAJ
And my brief entry about her on her death: http://cfpm-news.blogspot.com/2016/07/sad-to-announce-death-of-rosaria-conte.html
Whilst Rosaria’s academic work was rightly the bedrock of her reputation and influence, her personal qualities were also important in the development of the field of social simulation . At a professional level, she could hardly have been more supportive of researchers who were developing very different approaches to her own. Though I was developing (and insisting on) declarative rulebased methods for defining agents, she took me under her wing and promoted my position and reputation within the field. I know that I was by no means alone in benefitting from her professional support even though we disagreed about the appropriate fundamentals of our developing field.
Rosaria was actually a very funny woman with a humour that sometimes verged on the flirtatious — though if anyone took that seriously they were soon put (kindly and gently) in their place. She could also exhibit a flash of temper though, at least in my case, the one moment of anger was easily resolved and passed without any lasting rancour. Admittedly, she was a fierce defender of the role of women and those she thought were in any way discriminatory were not easily, if ever, forgiven.
And there was her singing. Rosaria was a very fine jazz vocalist. Very occasionally she would sing at conference dinners though not often and, for those who heard her, not often enough.
As most people that become a leader in their field, their academic accomplishments are beyond most what other people produce, but most importantly they open new avenues with their publications and their behaviour. Like others already remarked Rosaria was remarkable woman and it is difficult to capture in a few words why she was important to the field beyond the publications she left behind. I think her example of openness and willingness to embrace other perspectives is still a hallmark of the ESSA community today.
Personally I learned so much about cognitive models from her. Coming from a background in formal models we have had many discussions how to combine the rigour of formal models with the richness of human social behaviour. I miss those discussions nowadays, where many people are forced to focus on small publishable achievements rather than talk about radically new conceptual ideas.
I hope that we can live a bit according to her example and give to the next generation what we have learned from her. Be brave, speak up, but also listen and accommodate.