Call for Papers: ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020 International Workshop on Geospatial Simulation (GeoSim 2020)

Building upon two successful GeoSim workshops, the 2020 GeoSim Workshop (held in conjunction with the ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020 conference) is seeking papers.

The 3rd GeoSim workshop will focus on all aspects of simulation as a general paradigm to model and predict spatial systems and generate spatial data. New simulation methodologies and frameworks, not necessarily coming from the SIGSPATIAL community, are encouraged to participate. Also, this workshop is of interest to everyone who works with spatial data. The simulation methods that will be presented and discussed in the workshop should find a wide application across the community by producing benchmark datasets that can be parameterized and scaled.

The workshop seeks high-quality full (8-10 pages) and short (up to 4 pages) papers that will be peer-reviewed. Once accepted, at least one author is required to register for the workshop and the ACM SIGSPATIAL conference, as well as attend the workshop to present the accepted work which will then appear in the ACM Digital Library.

We solicit novel and previously unpublished research on all topics related to geospatial simulation including, but not limited to:

• Disease Spread Simulation
• Urban Simulation
• Agent Based Models for Spatial Simulation
• Multi-Agent Based Spatial Simulation
• Big Spatial Data Simulation
• Spatial Data/Trajectory Generators
• Road Traffic Simulation
• Environmental Simulation
• GIS using Spatial Simulation
• Modeling and Simulation of COVID-19
• Interactive Spatial Simulation
• Spatial Simulation Parallelization and Distribution
• Geo-Social Simulation and Data Generators
• Social Unrest and Riot Prediction using Simulation
• Spatial Analysis based on Simulation
• Behavioral Simulation
• Verifying, and Validating Spatial Simulations
• Applications for Spatial Simulation

Special Topic

The special topic for GeoSim 2020 brings focus to current trends in disease spread simulations, their practicality in predictive and prescriptive analytics, and the challenges they face in their use.

Workshop Information

• Submission Deadline: September 01, 2020
• Author Notification: September 27, 2020
• Workshop date November 03, 2020
• Workshop website http://www.geosim.org
• Submission site https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=geosim2020

Lipari School on Computational Social Science

If you are wondering what to do between July 26 and August 1, this summer, you might be interested in this years Lipari School on Computational Social Science which is focusing on Algorithms, Data, and Models for Social and Urban Systems. 

What will be taught at the summer school and why? To answer the these questions and to quote from the the homepage of the school:

 "Social and urban systems have been the focus of social science theory and research for centuries, but only until recently have computational approaches enabled novel explorations of challenging and enduring research questions and the opening of new frontiers for investigation. What is the role of Computational Social Science in advancing the science of social and urban systems? Which advanced algorithms and data structures play a key role in these investigations? In 2015 our Lipari Summer School in CSS will address questions such as the role of GIS (geographic/geospatial information systems), social media, big social data, agent-based models, network models, and their integration in the study, design, and implementation of social and urban systems. "

The speakers will be:

• Andrew Crooks, George Mason University who will speak about  GIS and Agent-Based Modeling. 
  
• Alexei Pozdnukhov from UC Berkeley who will speak about Location-Based Social Networks.
• Carlo Ratti from the MIT Senseable City Lab who will speak about Senseable Cities.

Special guest speakers will be:

• Paolo Ferragina from the University of Pisa, Italy.
• Wulf Daseking from the University of Freiburg, Germany.

To find out how to apply to attend the summer school click here. Students are encouraged to apply early because enrollment is competitive and limited.

AAG SPECIAL SESSION: Modeling Geographic Complexity

For those interested we are organizing a special session(s) at the forthcoming AAG in Washington DC. See below for details:

LOCATION AND DATES:
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
April 14-18, 2010, Washington, DC, USA

SPONSORS:
Spatial Analysis and Modeling, Geographic Information Systems and Science, Human Dimensions of Global Change Specialty Groups of the AAG and the Geographical Information Science Group of the Royal Geographical Society.

DESCRIPTION:

Understanding geographical systems represents one of the greatest challenges of our time. Complexity has emerged as a useful paradigm to effectively study linked human, socioeconomic and biophysical systems at a variety of different spatial and temporal scales. As a result, descriptive and predictive models of various levels of sophistication and using mostly agents, genetic algorithms, cellular automata and neural networks are now beginning to regularly appear in the geographic literature. However, there still remains many unresolved conceptual, technical and application challenges associated with these complexity based models. The goal of this session is to focus on the following themes:

1. Conceptual: shared and unique complexity signatures in geographic systems; existing and emerging geographical and complexity theories; epistemological and ontological influences; complexity based model designs; networks and hybrid models; linking classical and spatial statistics in complexity studies.
2. Technical: space-time patterns and dynamics; standardizing the development and representation of complex systems; rule selection and implementation; multiple-scale interactions and structure, system evolution and self-organization; learning and adaptation; calibration, validation and verification; path-dependence; non-linearity.
3. Applications: effectiveness of complexity models when embedded in political, institutional and socio-economic systems; human-environment interactions; earth systems science; land use science; landscape ecology; sustainability analysis.

In order to widely disseminate the ideas emerging from this session, the organizers of the session are exploring the possibility for a special issue of a journal and /or an edited book so that authors will have the opportunity to suitably revise their presentations for publication. Priority will be given for work that has not been published, in review or in press.

Please e-mail the abstract and key words with your expression of intent to Andrew Crooks by October 19th, 2009. Please make sure that your abstract conforms to the AAG guidelines in relation to title, word limit and key words and as specified at <http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/2010/papers.htm#instructions>. An abstract should be no more than 250 words that describes the presentation's purpose, methods, and conclusions as well as to include keywords. Full submissions will be given priority over submissions with just a paper title.

ORGANIZERS:

Arika Ligmann-Zielinska, Michigan State University <ligmannz@msu.edu>
Andrew Crooks, George Mason University <acrooks2@gmu.edu>
Alison Heppenstall, University of Leeds <A.J.Heppenstall@leeds.ac.uk>
Moira Zellner, University of Illinois at Chicago <mzellner@uic.edu>
Suzana Dragicevic, Simon Fraser University <suzanad@sfu.ca>,

TIMELINE:
September 3nd, 2009: Call for papers.

October 19th, 2009: Abstract submission and expression of intent to session organizers. E-mail Andrew Crooks by this date if you are interested in being in this session. Please submit an abstract and key words with your expression of intent. Full submissions will be given priority over submissions with just a paper title.

October 22nd, 2009: Session finalization. Session organizers determine session order and content and notify authors.

October 26th, 2009: Final abstract submission to AAG, via www.aag.org. All participants must register individually via this site. Upon registration you will be given a participant number (PIN). Send the PIN and a copy of your final abstract to Andrew Crooks . Neither the organizers nor the AAG will edit the abstracts.

October 28th, 2009: AAG registration deadline. Sessions submitted to AAG for approval.

April 14th -18th, 2010: AAG meeting, Washington DC, USA

Work update

Currently at CASA we are exploring ways to simulate various aspects of city life and visualize such models taking advantage of our London database which we are developing along with the advances in graphic card technology and networked communication. We presented some of this work at the AAG last week (click here to download the presentation and here to see the abstract).

Some of this includes modeling traffic. Following on from an earlier post by Andrew-Hudson Smith of Digital Urban about CityScape, the movie below shows our first attempts with the software.

AAG: The Rise of Neogeography

If any readers are attending the AAG next week in Las Vegas, Andrew Hudson-Smith of Digital Urban and myself have organised a session entitled "Concepts, Tools and Applications: The Rise of Neogeography." This session discusses the concepts, tools, applications and challenges arising when collecting, sharing and communicating data for the Neogeographer. The session explores a wide range of topics from Digital Earths, Volunteered Geographic Information and through to Virtual Worlds.

The session will take place on Friday, 27th of March, from 8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in the North Hall N116, Las Vegas Convention Center

The program is as follows:

• Verity Vlodovic (University of Nottingham) "Making your mind up: Second Life bucks the trend as the fizz goes out of GIS"
• Alex Singleton - University College London, "Virtual Geodemographics"
• Andrew Hudson-Smith, CASA, "Neogeography: Crowdsouring and Mapping for Masses"
• Paul Longley University College London, "Geovisualisation of the 2011 UK Census. Bringing the decennial Census to the Google generation"
• Donald Cooke - Tele Atlas "Neogeography and Crowdsourcing: the View from a Walled Garden"

Hope to see you there!

CASA S4 Modelling Tour Workshop

Last week CASA hosted a two day workshop showcasing our work along with researchers from the University of Leeds as part of the of the S4 European Spatial Analysis network modelling tour. Over 150 people both from the public and private sector came to the event from all across Europe. The first day of the event was designed to showcase CASA's use of new technologies for mapping and visualizing information about cities and was entitled "Geographic Information in a Web-Based World."

Talks ranged from introducing GMapCreator and MapTube which enable web-based mapping for sharing and visualising geographic information, to public engagement via the London Profiler, Public Profiler and the E-Society Classification websites. The geography and ethnicity of people's names was explored which introduced the WorldNames and Onomap websites.

Other talks on the first day explored the use of MapTube and GMapCreator for Crowdsourcing near-real time spatial surveys and understanding crowdsourced geographical information via the analysis of OpenStreetMap. On a more data oriented side, there were talks on exploring urban data collection and mapping, analysing and visualising fine scale urban form and socio-economic datasets. The day concluded with a talk by Andrew Hudson-Smith from Digital Urban on Web 2.0 and neogeography in real and virtual spaces: from geocaching through to Second Life.

The second day of the workshop was entitled "Developments in Urban Models, Simulation and Spatial Analysis" and talks ranged from: rank clocks and scaling in city sizes, geodemographics, retail modelling, the need to capture urban form patterns and processes in agent-based models, pedestrian modelling, consumer behaviour, microsimulation and 3D visualisation and communication of agent-based models.

Click here to see the full program and to download the presentations.

ABS2: Agent Based Spatial Simulation

A few weeks ago I attended a S4 workshop entitled “ABS2 Agent Based Spatial Simulation” organised by the SIMBAD (SIMulation Based on Agents to Aid Decision ) working group. The meeting was very interesting bringing agent-based modellers from a range of European countries to discuss recent work. The full program and presentations can be found here.

Modellers used a variety of software toolkits ranging from NetLogo, JADE, MATSims, AnyLogic and bespoke programs to explore a variety spatial simulations ranging from traffic simulations to land use change.

For example, road charging in Moscow (using AnyLogic), using MATSim to model travel and locational choices in Lyon, urban daily mobilities using MADKIT, how agents impact on traffic speed (using NetLogo), slowing down urban networks (e.g. to many cars leads to congestion), exploring how traffic lights affect the speed of movement and the distance between cars at different speeds). Demand responsive transport services of shared taxis over non fixed networks (e.g. the Modulobus project).



Moving away from traffic simulations, others explored the use of agent-based models to examine risks from toxic clouds, urban growth and forest fires (using JADE and GRASS), plague epidemics (NetLogo), landscape evolution due to a shifting cultivation system driven by social dynamics, the interrelationships between the built structure of a city and its social organization (Circle City is available here).



Talks also included the need to make agent-based modelling easier. For example, Philippe Mathieu discussed the need to be able to move agents behaviours between different models without the need to copy chunks of code. To this extent he showed us the IODA project. IODA basically allows one to create an interaction matrix of agent-behaviours (an ontology of agent interactions). Volker Grimm discussed individual-based models, and emphasised that representing agents is only one part of the modelling process. The other is the interaction between the agents. It was also noted that there is a need for better model descriptions with the ODD Protocol potentially being the solution.

2 day workshop at CASA

CASA is hosting a two day workshop on the 8th and 9th January 2009 in London: the first day of the event is designed to showcase CASA's use of new technologies for mapping and visualizing information about cities; the second day entails technical workshops, designed primarily for members of the S4 European Spatial Analysis network, but all are welcome.

Click here to see the full program and details about registration .

Neogeography: disseminating geographic content with Web 2.0 technologies

I gave a talk the other day on behalf of the GeoVue project at CASA at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference in London, and giving a paper entitled "Neogeography: disseminating geographic content with Web 2.0 technologies" in the The e-Social Science agenda: challenges and opportunities for geographers session. The session showcased new e-Social Science developments, explaining and illustrating the opportunities and challenges it poses for geographers, by disseminating the activities of geographers who are engaged in e Social Science. These include applications of e-Social Science in Evidence-based Policy Assessment (EBPA) and other fields of geographies that matter.

The abstract of the talk was:

"In CASA, we are working on Web 2.0 technologies that take geographic content and disseminate to a range of interested users from professionals to non-experts in a way that enables them to interact with the content and to add value to the visualisations that they are able to produce. This is essentially what Web 2.0 is all about – user driven content involving location and place as well as the networks that connect users together. It is the basis of what is currently being referred to as NeoGeography. In this talk, we will illustrate these technologies starting with our developments of virtual cities through our Virtual London model which is within Google Earth move to show how we can user other Google software to enables users to create their own maps using our GMap Creator software and then illustrate how we are building the equivalent of a YouTube for Geographers that we call MapTube. Much of the content that we are working with can also be ported into virtual worlds which represent the next stage of web based development and we will illustrate how we are porting such content from virtual cities and web -based maps into Second Life where we are piggy-backing this content into Nature’s Second Nature space."

Below is a movie of the talk (including all the movies and nice sound provided by Andrew Hudson-Smith's of Digital Urban, you might want to fast forward bits) and a pdf of the talk can be downloaded from here (15MD).


Neogeography: disseminating geographic content with Web 2.0 technologies from Andrew Crooks on Vimeo.

What was interesting is that while the research is of interest to a large online community as supported by interest from the BBC, potentially neogeography is still a niche topic in UK geography. Maybe it suggests that the 'traditional' geographer (what ever this is) is unaware of the latest digital technologies in reaching out for the masses.

On a side note we have a new working paper entitled "Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 through Crowdsourcing" which might be of interest.

Full reference:

Hudson-Smith, A., Batty, M., Crooks, A. T., and Milton, R. (2008), Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 through Crowdsourcing, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London): Working Paper 143, London, England. (pdf)

More information about the GeoVue project, Web 2.0, Second Life etc can be found and Andrew Hudson-Smith's Blog: Digital Urban http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/

The Building Blocks of the City: Points, Lines and Polygons

This week I will be attending the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference in London, and giving a paper entitled "The Building Blocks of the City: Points, Lines and Polygons" in a duel session called "Enhancing Complex Social Simulations with Automata Systems" on Thursday, organised by Geographical Information Science Research Group and Quantitative Methods Research Group of the RGS. The abstract for the talk is below, if you are around the conference come and say hello.

Talk outline:

"The Agent-based modelling (ABM) paradigm is becoming an increasingly used technique to study cities. It allows us to grow social structures ‘in silico’ specifically how a set of micro-specifications are sufficient to generate the macro-phenomena of interest. Until recently many applications of agent-based models exploring urban phenomena have used a regular partition of space (cells) to represent space. While these models have provided valuable insights into urban phenomena especially as they can capture geographic detail, they miss geometric detail. This area is critical to good applications but is barely touched upon in the literature.

Geometry (points, lines and polygons), forms the skeleton of cities from streets and buildings, through to parks, rivers, etc. The ability to represent the urban environment as a series of points, lines, and polygons allows for different size features such as houses and roads to be directly incorporated into the modelling process onto which other physical and social attributes can be added. Additionally the inclusion of geometry allows us to make agent-based models more realistic compared to representing the urban environment as a series of discrete regular cells.

This paper will explore how agent-based models coupled loosely with geographic information systems (GIS) can be created through illustrated examples focusing on residential location. These applications directly consider geometry when building these artificial worlds and running the simulation and highlight how the inclusion of geometry impacts on simulation results. Furthermore problems and challenges with this approach and ABM in general will be identified along with further work."

The talk can be downloaded from here (5.8MB). A previous post and a paper related to this talk can be found here.

Agent-Based Modelling for Housing

Today I attended and gave a talk at a workshop on ABM at the 4th International Conference on e-Social Science in Manchester. The title of the talk was “Agent-Based Modelling for Housing” and relates my previous work from my PhD and what I am currently working on. The abstract for my talk is as follows:

Cities play a critical role in our lives, providing habitats for more than half the world’s population in 2008 and this proportion is predicted to increase to over 75 percent by the year 2100. With this growth comes pressure on housing both in terms of supply and location. However, understanding such systems is extremely complex as they are composed of many parts, with many dynamically changing parameters and large numbers of discrete actors interacting within space. The heterogeneous nature of cities makes it difficult to generalise localised problems from that of city-wide problems. To understand urban problems such as sprawl, congestion and segregation, has recently lead researchers to focus on a bottom-up approach to urban systems, specifically researching the reasoning on which individual decisions are made. One such approach is agent-based modelling (ABM) which allows one to simulate the individual actions of diverse agents, measuring the resulting system behaviour and outcomes over time. Furthermore, such models allow us to test different ideas and theories of urban change in the safe environment of the computer, thus allowing scientists to understand urban phenomena through analysis and experimentation, a traditional goal of science.

With the rise of ABM, there has been a growing interest in developing integrated geographical information systems (GIS) and ABM applications. The linkage between the two allows agent-based modellers to have agents related to actual geographic locations and for GIS users, it provides the ability to model the emergence of phenomena through the individual interaction of features in a GIS over space and time.

This paper will explore how agent-based models coupled loosely with GIS can be created to explore housing issues such as segregation, and how residential and employee groups interact to form urban spatial structures characteristic of large cities through a series of illustrated examples dimensioned upon London. Furthermore the paper will discuss the potential of combing ABM with fine resolution data (e.g. Ordnance Survey MasterMap TOIDS to represent individual buildings; MasterMap’s Address layer to populate these building with a number of units, assigning individual agents to each of these units and sales data from the Land Registry to give the units a price) to create models exploring the small scale dynamics of the London housing market from the individual perspective. ABM is inherently suited to such a study as it allows the representation of an heterogeneous population with individual agents having different behaviours and characteristics. For example, the agent’s decisions/behaviour of where to locate is affected by numerous factors. Location is a trade-off between such things as price of dwelling, type of residence and its location, both in terms of neighbourhood and in relation to place of work, all of which vary depending on age, sex, marital status and income. To conclude the paper will present a series of problems and challenges with this approach and ABM in general.

The talk including useful references can be downloaded from here.

Geographically Explicit Agents

A quick post for anyone interested following on from a presentation that I gave Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Boston entitled “Using geographically explicit agents to explain and explore urban phenomena” given in the Agent Based Modeling II session

The Abstract of the talk was as follows:

"Agent-based modelling is at the forefront of computer modelling research focusing on the individual or groups of individuals, and how these individuals interact to form emergent structures. In particular, the ABM paradigm is becoming an increasingly used technique to study cities and regions. However, this new paradigm poses many challenges with regard to modelling. These include but are not limited to: the purpose for which the model is built, the extent to which the model is rooted in independent theory, the extent to which the model can be replicated, the way the model might be verified, calibrated and validated, the way model dynamics are represented in terms of agent interactions, the extent to which the model is operational, and the way the model can be communicated and shared with others. 

This paper will explore how we are addressing these issues with illustrated examples (applications) specifically focusing on residential segregation dimensioned upon London, which the author has developed and is currently developing. Furthermore, the models address other major problems with respect to agent-based modelling specifically integrating GIS within such models via a loose coupling approach. This integration of spatial data adds extra levels of complexity when studying urban phenomena, specifically that of segregation within agent-based models which is hardly touched upon in the literature. Furthermore, this integration allows the models to be grounded in actual places where geometrical features restrict agent interactions and how such places change over time. The paper will conclude with highlighting future avenues of research."

 

The presentation can be downloaded from here and a new working paper entitled “Constructing and Implementing an Agent-Based Model of Residential Segregation through Vector GIS” which slightly mirrors the talk can be found here. The full reference for this paper is:

Crooks, A. T. (2008), Constructing and Implementing an Agent-Based Model of Residential Segregation through Vector GIS, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London), Working Paper 133, London.

While the presentation focuses mainly on the second half of the abstract due to time constraints, further information about the challenges agent-based modelling poses with regard to modelling can be found in the following working paper:

Crooks, A. T., Castle, C. J .E. and Batty, M. (2007), Key Challenges in Agent-Based Modelling for Geo-Spatial Simulation, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London), Working Paper 121, London.

As always any thoughts or comments about the work or presentation are more than welcome.

Fine Scale Modelling of the London Housing Market

Over the last few weeks Duncan Smith and I have been working on paper entitled “Fine Scale Modelling of the London Housing Market” for the GISRUK 2008 conference.

The motivation behind this research comes from the lack of fine scale property data within England. Unlike other countries, England has no national cadastre on housing attributes (such as size, type and age) which restricts application of GIS in planning. While new datasets are becoming available, we have become interested in exploring if combining recent datasets, such as OS address data and Land Registry transaction data can begin to fill this data gap? And if this is the case, could a fine scale housing database developed from these datasets be used to improve house price modelling?

Isle of Dogs Housing Density 3D Map.

While at present this is work in progress, the presentation outlines our current work and initial findings while the paper suggests future work, such as the creation of an agent-based model exploring residential choice.

Click here to download the presentation and here for the paper. Any comments most welcome.

Full Reference:

Crooks, A. T., Smith, D. A., and Theseira, M. (2008), The Fine Scale Spatial Dynamics of the Greater London Housing Market, in Lambrick, D. (ed.), Proceedings of the 16th Geographical Information Systems Research UK Conference, UNIGIS, Manchester Metropolitan University, England, pp. 117-124. (pdf)

ABM–S4–ESHIA Summer School

Mike Batty and myself have recently attended a summer school entitled 'Agent Based Models for Spatial Systems in Social Sciences Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting' or ABM–S4–ESHIA for short. This summer school was organized by both by the European GDR S4 (Spatial Simulation for the Social Sciences), and the ESHIA (Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents ). Full details about the talks including .pdfs can be found here.

While at the summer school Mike and myself gave a workshop entitled 'How to Build an Agent-Based Model'. I thought it would be useful to share this workshop/.pdfs to a wider audience. The workshop was organised into three parts/talks.

The first talk was given by Mike focusing on "Models and Theories: Science, Validation,
Verification and Calibration." Within this talk Mike discussed what should be considered when building an agent-based model. Specifically outlining what are models, types of models and how models can be based on 'Stylized Facts'. Before focusing on how to develop models using a software environment.

This lead to second talk presented by myself on how a geospatial agent-based model can be developed using such a software environment. In this case using Repast. Within this talk, there was a discussion of what Repast is, examples of models created in Repast specifically those utilising Raster and Vector data sets and what the difference between the two are.


The third talk was given by Mike which focused on Cellular Automata (CA). Within this talk there was a discussion on CA applications, specifically focusing on urban growth and land cover (LUCC) etc. This was followed by how one represents space and dynamics within models, the key elements of CA models and a list of groups actively researching urban phenomena utilizing CA models. To give an example of a CA model the DUEM model (Dynamic Urban Evolutionary Model) was given.

Hopefully in the future we will have time to develop this material in the future but for now you can download any of the talks as .pdf by clicking on the number one, two and three.

CASA at Agenda Setting Workshop on ABM of Complex Spatial Systems

Andrew Hudson-Smith, Mike Batty, Victor Schinazi and Paul Longley from CASA have been attending the NSF/ESRC Agenda Setting Workshop on Agent Based Modelling (ABM) of Complex Spatial Systems in Santa Barbara. Andy has written two posts about the workshop on his blog: Digital Urban. If you are interested in the ABM and where it is heading its worth checking out his posts from Day 1 and Day 2 of the workshop. Its also worth having a look at the position papers of people attending the workshop .

On a side note his blog is worth exploring Digital Urban anyway as it details and provides examples of CASA research in the fields of digital cities and visualisation on the local, regional and global scale.

Agent-Based Modeling of Complex Spatial Systems

NSF/ESRC Agenda Setting Workshop on Agent-Based Modeling of Complex Spatial Systems: April 14-16, 2007 at University of California at Santa Barbara

NSF and ESRC are organising a joint workshop on this topic bringing together those who are funded and associated with the US CyberInfrastructure Program within the Social and Behavioral Sciences Division and the UK National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) to brainstorm an agenda for research into agent-based modelling in complex spatial systems. The workshop will review the state of the art, develop critiques of the field and define promising research directions and applications. We will report the outcomes of the workshop once it has been held and conclusions reached.

Further information on the workshop can be seen here: http://ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/abmcss/ including a participant list which lists peoples biographies and position papers with regard to agent-based modelling.

Improving Evidence Based Policy Decisions

Improving Evidence Based Policy Decisions: Piloting the Application of Advanced Computer Modelling Techniques to Real Life Policy Problems

The other day we attended a workshop organised by Georgios Theodoropoulos from the University of Birmingham called Improving Evidence Based Policy Decisions

We gave a talk entitled ‘Validating and Verifying Agent-Based Models for Planning and Public Policy Analysis’ which focused around validation and verification of ABM (issues which will be explored in later posts). The presentation highlighted how urban modelling has changed, especially how we conceptualise systems; a move from aggregate, to disaggregate; focusing on change not equilibrium, where dynamics has come to the fore. Thus a crucial issue is how do we know how good this new class of models is in terms of their fit to reality? Do we even need to worry about this any longer? These issues where explored using ABM developed at CASA from fine scale pedestrian models to more aggregate models examining residential segregation and urban sprawl.

Other talks examined the role data driven simulation for housing policy which is part of the Adaptive Intelligent Model-Building for the Social Sciences using Symbiotic Simulation (AIMSS) project. While Mark Birkin gave a talk entitled ‘Issues in the specification and validation of a complex socio-demographic simulation model’ which showed the MoSeS (Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science) project from the University of Leeds which aims to develop a demographic simulation at the level of individuals and households to give robust forecasts of the future population of the UK based on microsimulation techniques but in a dynamic context.

A copy of the presentation Mike Batty and I gave can be downloaded by clicking here. Any comments more than welcome.

For details of other talks (including pdfs) see the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) website

Agent Based models at CASA

A few of us at CASA presented our work on ABM in January to a collection of people from both academic and private sector, Kay Kitazawa (Presented by Mike Batty in her absence) talked about “Agent-Based Analysis for Patterns of Children’s Activities”*. John Ward talked about “Pedestrian Dynamics: Models of Pedestrian Behaviour.” Vassilis Zachariadis presented his work on “An Agent-Based Approach to the Simulation of Pedestrian Movement and Factors that Control It*.” Christian Castle, presented his work "A Decision Support System for Evacuation using Agent-Based Simulation to evaluate the Kings Cross Redevelopment"*. Joana Barros (of Birkbeck formally a CASA PhD student) presented her PhD: "Urban Dynamics in Latin American Cities: An Agent-Based Simulation Approach"*. While I gave an overview talk on Repast entitled "An Introduction to the Repast Software" and another on my models I am developing for my PhD: “Integration of Agent-Based Simulation and GIS: Applied to Segregation"*. A full program and PowerPoint slides can be seen at: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/repast/

*Utilising the Repast Software