Pedestrians to Cities with Agent-based modeling and GIS

GRAND Seminar April 3, noon, Tuesday, 2012, ENGR 4201

Andrew Crooks
Assistant professor
Department of Computational Social Science

Host:

Jan Allbeck

Abstract: This talk will explore how agent-based models can be explicitly linked to "real world" locations with spatial information and be used to explore a wide range of social phenomena. From that of the small scale movement of pedestrians over seconds; to that of urban growth over decades. All the applications will focus on individuals or groups of individuals and how such interactions lead to more aggregate patterns emerging. Moreover, the talk will demonstrate how new technologies and sources of information (e.g. volunteered geographic information and twitter) can be used to inform the model building process.

Short Bio:

Andrew Crooks is an assistant professor in the Department of Computational Social Science and a researcher in the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University. He holds a PhD from University College London.

His research relates to exploring, understanding and the communication of urban built and socio-economic environments using geographic information systems (GIS), spatial analysis, geovisualisation, social network analysis and agent-based modeling methodologies. Further information about these interests is available on his blog http://gisagents.blogspot.com/ or personal website http://www.css.gmu.edu/andrew/