Thursday, February 12, 2015

Village Model

http://village.anth.wsu.edu/node/67
What now seems like a very long long time ago, when I was getting up to speed with Agent-based modeling and GIS, I came across a great edited book entitled "Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes". 

One chapter in particular that I really enjoyed because of its clarity and use of data was by Kohler et al. (2000) entitled "Be There Then: A Modeling Approach to Settlement Determinants and Spatial Efficiency Among Late Ancestral Pueblo Populations of the Mesa Verde Region, U.S. Southwest". 

The chapter explored the question of why did Pueblo people vary their living arrangements between  compact villages and dispersed hamlets between 901-1287AD? To this day, I use this chapter when I am teaching about early agent-based models. While the initial model was implemented in Swarm, it has now been ported to Repast and developed further by an NSF supported program called Village Ecodynamics Project.




Full Reference:
Kohler, T.A., Kresl, J., Van Wes, Q., Carr, E. and Wilshusen, R.H. (2000), 'Be There Then: A Modeling Approach to Settlement Determinants and Spatial Efficiency Among Late Ancestral Pueblo Populations of the Mesa Verde Region, U.S. Southwest', in Kohler, T.A. and Gumerman, G.J. (eds.), Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 145-178.

Monday, February 09, 2015

Geosimulation and Big Data: A Marriage made in Heaven or Hell? Schedule

Do you like big data and geosimulation and wondering when to book flights or which sessions to attend at the forthcoming AAG Annual Meeting,  If so, you might like our sessions entitled "Geosimulation and Big Data: A Marriage made in Heaven or Hell? " taking place on Wednesday the 22nd of April 2015.

Abstract of the Sessions:

In recent years, human emotions, intentions, moods and behaviors have been digitised to an extent previously unimagined in the social sciences. This has been in the main due to the rise of a vast array of new data, termed 'Big Data'.  These new forms of data have the potential to reshape the future directions of social science research, in particular the methods that scientists use to model and simulate spatially explicit social systems. Given the novelty of this potential "revolution" and the surprising lack of reliable behavioral insight to arise from Big Data research, it is an opportune time to assess the progress that has been made and consider the future directions of socio-spatial modelling in a world that is becoming increasingly well described by Big Data sources.

In these sessions we will have methodological, theoretical and empirical papers that that engage with any aspect of geospatial modelling and the use of Big Data. We are particularly interested in the ways that insight into individual or group behavior can be elucidated from new data sources - including social media contributions, volunteered geographical information, mobile telephone transactions, individually-sensed data, crowd-sourced information, etc. -  and used to improve models or simulations.  Topics include, but are not limited to:
  • Using Big Data to inform individual-based models of geographical systems;
  • Translating Big Data into agent rules;
  • Elucidating behavioral information from diverse data;
  • Improving simulated agent behavior;
  • Validating agent-based models (ABM) with Big Data;
  • Ethics of data collected en masse and their use in simulation.
2192 Geosimulation and Big Data: A Marriage made in Heaven or Hell? (1)

Wednesday, 4/22/2015.
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM.
600a Classroom, University of Chicago Gleacher Center, 6th Floor.

Chair: Nick Malleson 

Abstracts:

*Atsushi Nara:
A GPGPU approach for simulating and analyzing human dynamics
*Kira KowalskaJohn Shawe-Taylor and Paul Longley:
 Data-driven modelling of police patrol activity 
*Martin Zaltz Austwick, Gustavo Romanillos Arroyo and Borka Moya-Gomez:
Simulating Rush Hour Bicycle Traffic in Madrid 
*Hai Lan  and Paul Torrens:
Voxel based Cellular Automata with massive cells for Geo-simulation: Ice dynamics simulation in Antarctic locations as example
*Philippe J. Giabbanelli, Thomas Burgoine, Pablo Monsivais and James Woodcock:
Using big data to develop individual-centric models of food behaviours

2292 Geosimulation and Big Data: A Marriage made in Heaven or Hell? (2) 

Wednesday, 4/22/2015.
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM.
600a Classroom, University of Chicago Gleacher Center, 6th Floor.

Chair: Alison Heppenstall

Abstracts:

*Kostas Cheliotis:
Coupling Public Space Simulations with Real-Time Data Streams 
*Andrew Crooks and Sarah Wise:
Leveraging Crowdsourced data for Agent-based modeling: Opportunities, Examples and Challenges 
*Ed Manley, Chen Zhong and Michael Batty:
Towards Real-Time Simulation of Transportation Disruption - Building Agent Populations from Big Mobility Data 
*Alison Heppenstall, *Nick Malleson and Andrew Evans:
Evaluating Big Data demographics for population modelling 
Muhammad Adnan, Alistair Leak and *Paul Longley:
Exploring the geo-temporal patterns of Twitter messages

2492 Geosimulation and Big Data: A Marriage made in Heaven or Hell? (3) Discussion Session

Wednesday, 4/22/2015.
1:20 PM - 3:00 PM.
600a Classroom, University of Chicago Gleacher Center, 6th Floor.

Chair: Nick Malleson

Abstracts:
 
*Paul M Torrens and Hai Lan:
Micro big data and geosimulation 
*Mark Birkin:
The Ten Commandments of Big Data 
 2:00 PM to 3:00PM: Discussion

 Organizers

  • Alison Heppenstall, School of Geography, University of Leeds
  • Nick Malleson, School of Geography, University of Leeds
  • Andrew Crooks, Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University
  • Paul Torrens, Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland
  • Ed Manley, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Agent-based models in a web browser

Sharing agent-based models over the web is never very easy. You can do it with NetLogo but it requires that your web browser supports  Java 5 (but this is not recommended). One could create a jar file for your model if you are using MASON, for example. But this still requires a number of steps before you see the model running. One way to bypass this is to build the model directly into the web page. While we have highlighted the use of JavaScript for Agent-based modeling in a previous post. Ernesto Carrella, a PhD  candidate from the Department of Computational Social Science has just created some proof of concept agent-based models exploring fishing using Dart which are overlaid on top of Google maps. If you want to find out more, checkout his models over on GitHub.