Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges Talks @ AAG

Last year we put out a call for abstracts for presentations for our sessions Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges. The session description is as follows: 

There is an urgent need for research that promotes sustainability in an era of societal challenges ranging from climate change, population growth, aging and wellbeing to that of pandemics. These need to be directly fed into policy. We, as a Geosimulation community, have the skills and knowledge to use the latest theory, models and evidence to make a positive and disruptive impact. These include agent-based modeling, microsimulation and increasingly, machine learning methods. However, there are several key questions that we need to address which we seek to cover in this session. For example, What do we need to be able to contribute to policy in a more direct and timely manner? What new or existing research approaches are needed? How can we make sure they are robust enough to be used in decision making? How can geosimulation be used to link across citizens, policy and practice and respond to these societal challenges? What are the cross-scale local trade-offs that will have to be negotiated as we re-configure and transform our urban and rural environments? How can spatial data (and analysis) be used to support the co-production of truly sustainable solutions, achieve social buy-in and social acceptance? And thereby co-produce solutions with citizens and policy makers.

The call generated enough interest to allow us to organize two sessions with respect to geosimulations. With the AAG ongoing we thought we would post the session details and talks. Both sessions will take place in on Thursday the 27th of March in Room 420B, Level 4, Huntington Place.

Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges (2); Time: 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM

Chair: Andrew Crooks

Presentations: 

• Kejian Li, Jiaqi Ge, Nik Lomax and Gary Polhill
• Title: Agent-Based Modeling of Food Trade Disruptions: Insights from the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
• Bryan Collins and Kathleen Liang
• Title: Agent-Based Modeling to Explore Social, Economic, And Environmental Links Within the North Carolina Poultry Industry
• Dylan Munson,  Simon Mak and John Miller
• Title: Environmental policy in the context of complex systems: statistical theory and practice
• Jeon-Young Kang, Jinwoo Park, and Huiji Jeong
• Title: Agent-Based Modeling for Exploring Spatial Accessibility to Urban Green Space
• Yan Liu, University of Queensland
• Title: Urban growth simulation using cellular automata and machine learning approaches

Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges (2); Time: 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM

Chair: Fuzhen Yin

Presentations: 

• Raja Sengupta and Saeed Harati Asl
• Title: Why overthink Mobility in Agent-Based Models when optimization works?
• Zhongyu Zhou
• Title: Strategic Response Dynamics: Simulating Evacuation and Engagement in Airport Security Scenarios
• Moongi Choi, Jiwoo Seo, and Alexander Hohl
• Title: Agent-Based Travel Scheduler: Derivation of Spatiotemporal Risk Areas and Travel Behaviors During Pandemic
• Na Jiang, Boyu Wang and Andrew Crooks
• Title: Large language models for conceptualizing, designing, and generating agent-based models

We hope to see you there.

New Editorial: Cities and disasters: What can urban analytics do?

In the past I have blogged about disasters, but mainly from a social media or agent-based modeling perspective. However, after the devastating wildfires that impacted parts of Los Angeles County earlier this year led me to wonder how resilient are cities to such events? Or more generally, what role could urban analytics play on the various stages of disaster management (i.e., preparation, response, recovery, and mitigation), or how can data, models, and methods at the disposal of researchers be leveraged to better prepare us for future disasters and be linked to policy?

If these questions sound of interest, I encourage you to go and read  a short editorial that I recently published in Environment and Planning B entitled "Cities and Disasters: What can Urban Analytics Do?"

Full referece: 

Crooks, A.T. (2024), Cities and Disasters: What can Urban Analytics Do?, Environment and Planning B, 52(3): 523-526. (pdf)

Call for Papers: Integrating LLMs and Geospatial Foundation Models to Enhance Spatial Reasoning in ABMs

We are delighted to announce a special track on “Integrating Large-Language Models and Geospatial Foundation Models to Enhance Spatial Reasoning in ABMs” as part of the Social Simulation Conference 2025, 25th to 29th August 2025 at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Full conference details can be found at the end of this email.

Abstract for the Special Track:

Recent developments in the use of large language models (LLMs) offer exciting opportunities to control agent behaviour in potentially more realistic and nuanced ways than has previously been possible. However, an LLM-backed agent can only interface with their surroundings through text prompts, which is severely limiting. The integration of large language models (LLMs) and geospatial foundation models (GFMs) presents an exciting opportunity to use AI techniques to advance agent-based modelling for spatial applications, potentially allowing for agents with more comprehensive behavioural realism, as well as an improved perception of their environment.

This special track invites papers that explore how AI techniques, such as LLMs and GFMs, can enrich spatial agent based models, raising new questions about their feasibility in modelling human behaviour, in comparison to conventional approaches. There are huge challenges around computational efficiency, sustainability, bias, model validation, and integration frameworks, and we welcome papers that consider these issues as well.

Paper submission deadlines and details: https://ssc2025.tbm.tudelft.nl/important-dates/

Paper types: 

• Long paper (10-12 pages, excluding references – long oral presentations, will be included in the post-proceedings)
• Short paper (6-9 pages, excluding references – short oral presentations, will be included in the post-proceedings)
• Extended abstract (3-4 pages, excluding references – short oral presentations, will not be included in the post-proceedings)

Track Organizers:

• Nick Malleson, University of Leeds, UK
• Alison Heppenstall, University of Glasgow, UK
• Ed Manley, University of Leeds, UK
• Andrew Crooks, University of Buffalo, US

Please feel free to get in touch with any of us in case of questions.