Social Simulation Conference (SSC 2024)

Last week I had the honor to give a keynote talk entitled "Exploring the World from the Bottom Up with GIS and Agent-based Models: Past, Present and Future" at the 19th annual Social Simulation Conference which is the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) annual conference. Attending the conference was a great experience being exposed to various applications of social simulation, catching up with old friends and meeting many new people. For anyone interested below I have pasted the abstract from my talk and the slides from the talk can be found here. 

Abstract

 We have seen explosion in the availability of data along with utilizing such data in agent-based models. At the same time, we have seen a huge growth in computational power and the associating agent-based models to real world locations through the use of geographical information systems (GIS). This talk will explore how geographically explicit agent-based models have grown and evolved over the last 20 years taking advantage of the explosion of data and computational power. It will showcase a selection of applications of agent-based models and how they can be used to explore the world from the bottom up and with a specific emphasis on cities and regions. Through examples, I will demonstrate how GIS can be used to build agent-based models ranging from using spatial data to create the artificial worlds that the agents inhabit to utilizing demographic data to build synthetic populations. However, it is not just data that is important when building agent-based models but also how do we incorporate human behavior and theory into such models along with considerations of connecting agents through various types of social and spatial networks. While this might appear simple, there are many challenges associated with this which will be discussed using representative examples ranging from basic patterns of life to vaccination uptake. The talk will conclude with what opportunities are emerging in light of the recent growth in artificial intelligence (AI) with respect to building agent-based models. 

 Keywords: Agent-based modeling, AI, GIS, Social Networks, Cities.

Types of Problems Agent-Based Models have Explored

Growth of Geographical Agent-based models.

Referece: 

Crooks, A.T. (2024), Exploring the World from the Bottom Up with GIS and Agent-based Models: Past, Present and Future. The 19th Annual Social Simulation Conference, 16th –20th September, Cracow, Poland.