This video, brought to you by our friends over at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, does a great job of explaining in easy-to-understand terms what agent-based modeling is, and how it can be useful for both understanding the past and making the past relevant to the present. No small feat to accomplish in about 3 minutes. Have a look!
University of Kiel, Germany will be hosting a workshop “Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes IV” between 20-24th March 2017. It includes several sessions on simulation, modelling and ABM with a special emphasis on socio-natural systems. The abstract submission deadline is a still quite some time (30th November) but it may be worth putting the event into your calendars if you are not planning on crossing the ocean for the CAA in Atlanta or the SAAs in Vancouver.
For more information see the workshop website: http://www.workshop-gshdl.uni-kiel.de
Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel#/media/File:Postcard_Panorama_of_Kiel_(1902).jpg
To prove that there is a world beyond agents, turtles and all things ABM, we have created a neat little tutorial in system dynamics implemented in Python.
Delivered by Xavier Rubio-Campillo and Jonas Alcaina just a few days ago at the annual Digital Humanities conference (this year held in the most wonderful of all cities – Krakow), it is tailored to humanities students so it does not require any previous experience in coding.
System dynamics is a type of mathematical or equation-based modelling. Archaeologists (with a few noble exceptions) have so far shunned from, what is often perceived as, ‘pure math’ mostly citing the ‘too simplistic’ argument when awful mathematics teacher trauma was probably the real reason. However, in many cases an ABM is a complete overkill when a simple system dynamics model would be well within one’s abilities. So give it a go if only to ‘dewizardify’* the equations.
Follow this link for the zip file with the tutorial: https://zenodo.org/record/57660#.V4YIIKu7Ldk
*the term ‘dewizardify’ courtesy of SSI fellow Robert Davey (@froggleston)
The CSSSA will be hosting its annual conference in November, bringing researchers from all stripes of computational social science together in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico. According to the website, some of the topics to be discussed at the meeting include (but are not limited to):
Applications close August 15th, 2016. For more information, check out the CSSSA website.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Public Domain
Possibly the longest running meeting on agent-based modeling, SwarmFest, is being held this July at the University of Vermont campus in Burlington. Now in its 20th(!) year, SwarmFest brings together people from a range of backgrounds in ABM and simulation. From the website:
SwarmFest is the annual meeting of the Swarm Development Group (SDG), and one of the oldest communities involved in the development and propagation of agent-based modeling. SwarmFest has traditionally involved a mix of both tool-users and tool-developers, drawn from many domains of expertise. These have included, in the past, computer scientists, software engineers, biomedical researchers, ecologists, economists, political scientists, social scientists, resource management specialists and evolutionary biologists. SwarmFest represents a low-key environment for researchers to explore new ideas and approaches, and benefit from a multi-disciplinary environment.
Given the concentration of computational and complexity labs at UVM, this promises to be a very exciting meeting. And summertime is a fantastic time to be on Lake Champlain, or really any lake in New England, so I wholeheartedly recommend the trek to Burlington.
Call of abstracts closes June 15th, so get in quickly. For more info, see the website.
If the most important annual conference in complex systems simulation is anything to go by then researchers in humanities are slowly infiltrating the ranks of complexity scientists.
This year the CSS (Complex Systems Society) conference is taking place in Amsterdam between 19-22 September. It is structured a bit differently than traditional conferences, that is, it consists of two main parts:
Archaeology (and humanities in general) has been on and off the agenda since 2013 but usually this meant one dedicated session and perhaps a paper or two in the core sessions classified as social systems simulations. However, this year there seems to be a bit of an explosion (let’s call it ‘exponential growth’!) in the number of sessions led by folk who have interest in the past. These three are particularly relevant:
10. Complexity and the Human Past: Unleashing the Potential of Archaeology and Related Disciplines
Organizer: Dr. Sergi Lozano
26. Complexity History. Complexity for History and History for Complexity
Organizer: Assoc Prof. Andrea Nanetti
27. The Anthropogenic Earth System: Modeling Social Systems, Landscapes, and Urban Dynamics as a Coupled Human+Climate System up to Planetary Scale
Organizer: Dr. John T. Murphy
In addition, there are a number of satellite sessions that, although not dealing specifically with past systems, may be of interest for anyone who deals with evolution, urban development, economic systems or networks and game theory. Finally, the most excellent student conference on complex systems (SCCS) will run just prior to the main event, between 16-18 September.
To submit an abstract, get in touch with the session organiser (you can find their emails here). The official deadline is 10th July, but the organisers may have imposed a different schedule so get in your abstract soon. And see you all in Amsterdam!
Image above: http://www.ccs2016.org
In the old day things were simple – if you borrowed data, an idea, a method, or any specific piece of information, you knew you need to cite the source of such wisdom. With the rise of online communication these lines have become more blurred, especially in the domain of research software.
Although we use a wide variety of software to conduct our research it is not immediately obvious which of them deserve a formal citation, which should be mentioned and which can be left out completely. Imagine three researchers doing exactly the same piece of data analysis: the first one uses Excel, the second – SPSS, the third coded it up in R. The chances are that the Excel scholar won’t disclose which particular tool allowed him to calculate the p-values, the SPSS user will probably mention what they used, including the version of the software and the particular function employed, finally the R wizard is quite likely to actually cite R in the same way as they would cite a journal paper.
You may think this is not a big deal and we are talking about the fringes of science, but in fact it is. As everyone who has ever tried to replicate (or even just run) someone else’s simulation will tell you, without detailed information on software that was used, the chances of succeeding vary between virtually impossible to very difficult. But apart from the reproducibility of research there is also the issue of credit. Some (probably most) of the software tools we are using were developed by people in research positions – as their colleagues were producing papers, they have spent their time developing code. In the world of publish or perish they may be severely disadvantaged if their effort is not credited in the same way as their colleagues. Spending two years developing a software tool that is used by hundreds of other researchers and not getting a job because the other candidate had published three conference papers in the meantime, sounds like a rough deal.
To make it easier to navigate this particular corner of academia, we teamed up with research software usurers and developers during the Software Sustainability Institute Hackday and created a simple chart and a website to help you make the decision of when to and when not to cite research software.
If you’re still unsure check out the website we put together for more information about research software credit, including a short guide on how to get people to cite YOUR software: bit.ly/shouldacite Also, keep in mindt hat any model uploaded to OpenABM gets a citation and a doi, making it easy to cite.
Our colleagues from Barcelona are organising a two-day workshop on the challenges of relating formal models (not only ABMs but other types of simulation and computational models as well) to the archaeological data. See below for an extended summary. The deadline for abstract submission has been extended to 25th April. For more information, check out their website.
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Aim
While these advances are providing powerful tools that are enabling us to tackle old and new research questions, their use is rarely coupled with appropriate epistemological discussions on how to ultimately relate the model to the data. Problems such as the choice of an appropriate statistic describing the empirical record, the balance between parsimony, complexity, and goodness-of-fit, the integration of taphonomic and sampling biases, or the inferential framework for selecting or rejecting alternative hypotheses rarely occupy the spotlight. In the case of simulation models, discussions are often limited to the model-building stage, and comparisons between prediction and observation are too often qualitative and not supported by sufficient statistical rigour. Yet this is the fundamental step that enables us to evaluate our models. In historical sciences, where the challenges imposed by the nature and the quality of our samples is at its greatest, this issue deserves more discussions and solutions. We believe that this is a critical issue that transcends the specific used in each discipline and cannot be dismissed as a challenge for statisticians.
We invite experts at different stage of this endeavour, sharing the same challenge of evaluating archaeological, historical, and anthropological model to the empirical evidence. We welcome the widest range of expertise (e.g. agent-based simulation, phylogenetics, network analysis, Bayesian inference, etc.) in order to promote the cross-fertilisation of techniques, as well as to engage into deeper theoretical and methodological discussions that transcends the specific of a given geographical and historical context. Participants will present examples showcasing problems (and solutions) on a variety of topics, including: uncertainty in the observed data, parameter search and estimation, model reusability and reproducibility, and more broadly applications of hypothesis testing and model-comparison frameworks in archaeology, anthropology, and history.
Call For Papers
Abstract Deadline: 25th April 2016
Abstract Length : max 300 words
Please submit via email to the address simulpast@gmail.com with the subject: “WK-Empirical Challenge”
You may remember the SPUHH (Simulating the Past to Understand Human History) event in Barcelona in 2014. It was a satellite to the Social Simulation Conference – an annual gathering of researchers whose models are concerned with complex social systems. This year edition of the SSC is taking place in Rome, September 19-23. The paper abstract deadline is 18th April.
Although there are no sessions dedicated specifically to archaeology this year, this is a great opportunity to get a bit of an insight into what our colleagues [working on humans you can actually talk to because they are not so very dead] are up to. Often you can find many commonalities between their and our problems, models and interpretations. Not to mention, an occasional check on what is going on in the world of social theory is always useful.
Like every year, the conference is followed by a week long summer school in social simulation using NetLogo. For more details see here: http://www.ssc2016.cnr.it/essa-s4/
You can now procrastinate for hours learn about agent-based modelling by playing a computer game!
Yep, life research doesn’t get any better than this.
Our colleagues from the Supercomputer Centre in Barcelona and Simulpast have released a game! Evolving Planet has an archaeologically inspired plot, easy to grasp interface and cool graphics making it an absolutely outstanding procrastination tool (what do you mean ‘stop wasting time playing computer games’? I’m doing research here!).
You steer a group of bots trying to achieve tasks such as obtaining resource, arriving at a specific location or influencing another group within precise time brackets. You can give them certain qualities (ability to move faster, a boost to fertility, etc) but the internal workings of the bots are set in stone (well, code), which is a nice way of showing the methodology behind simulation. By manipulating the bots characteristics, what you are in fact doing is testing different behavioural scenarios: would a bigger but slower group be more successful in dispersal? Can you achieve the goal faster with a highly militaristic group or with a friendly ‘influencing’ group?
I breezed through the ‘dispersal’ part but struggled in several of the later missions indicating that the game is very well grounded in the most current research. However, archaeologists who do ABM (of dispersal…) on a daily basis are probably not the target audience since the whole point of the game seems to be helping non-modellers understand what the technique can and what it cannot do and what kind of questions can you approach with it (+ having some fun). So get your non-coding friends on board and hopefully, they won’t get an idea that all we do whole day long is gaming. And even if they do, they’ll join rather than cut our funding.
Evolving Planet can be downloaded from the apple and android app stores for free. For more information: http://evolvingplanetgame.com
Image source: Evolving Planet presskit . http://evolvingplanetgame.com
