Dr. Heydari makes her Osman Lab debut!

Dr. Zahra Heydari took the stage for the first time as part of the Osman Lab!

At the 2025 Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) Annual Meeting, she presented work on using large language models (LLMs) to explore complex, multi-actor negotiation systems. Her talk demonstrated how models like Claude and Gemini can rapidly generate multi-round treaty-style negotiations among hypothetical riparian nations, while also revealing critical limitations, such as unstable preferences, mathematical inconsistencies, and confusion about actor roles, that highlight the risks of treating prompted LLMs as autonomous agents. The session, Modeling Complexity in Systems and Networks, brought together researchers working across environmental risk, governance, and simulation modeling, fostering great discussions about how emerging AI tools can support, not replace, rigorous systems analysis.