Call for Papers – Symposium on Human Dynamics in Smart and Connected Communities: Agents – the ‘atomic unit’ of social systems?
We welcome paper submissions for our session(s) at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting on 5-9 April, 2017, in Boston.
Session Description:
By defining a social system as a collection of agents, individuals and their behaviors/decisions become the driving force of these systems. Complex global phenomena such as collective behaviors, extensive spatial patterns, and hierarchies are manifested through agent interaction in such a way that the actions of the parts do not simply sum to the activity of the whole. This allows unique perspectives into the inner workings of social systems, making agent-based modelling (ABM) a powerful and appealing tool for understanding the drivers of these systems and how they may change in the future.
What is noticeable from recent applications of ABM is the increase in complexity (richness and detail) of the agents, a factor made possible through new data sources and increased computational power. While there has always been ‘resistance’ to the notion that social scientists should search for some ‘atomic element or unit’ of representation that characterizes the geography of a place, the shift from aggregate to individual mark agents as a clear contender to fulfill the role of ‘atom’ in social simulation modelling. However, there are a number of methodological challenges that need to be addressed if ABM is to fully realize its potential and be recognized as a powerful tool for policy modelling in key societal issues. Most pressing are methods to accurately identify, represent, and evaluate key behaviors and their drivers in ABM.
We invite any papers that contribute towards this wide discussion ranging from epistemological perspectives of the place of ABM, extracting behavior from novel and established data sets to new, intriguing applications to establishing robustness in calibrating and validating ABMs.
Please e-mail the abstract and key words with your expression of intent to Andrew Crooks (acrooks2@gmu.edu) by 22nd October, 2016 (one week before the AAG session deadline). Please make sure that your abstract conforms to the AAG guidelines in relation to title, word limit and key words and as specified at:
An abstract should be no more than 250 words that describe the presentation’s purpose, methods, and conclusions.
Timeline summary:
- 20th October, 2016: Abstract submission deadline. 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.
- 24th October, 2016: Session finalization and author notification
- 26th October, 2016: Final abstract submission to AAG, via http://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.
- 27th October, 2016: AAG registration deadline. Sessions submitted to AAG for approval.
- 5-9th April, 2017: AAG Annual Meeting.
Organizers:
- Andrew Crooks, Department of Computational and Data Sciences, George Mason University.
- Alison Heppenstall, School of Geography, University of Leeds.
- Nick Malleson, School of Geography, University of Leeds
- Paul Torrens, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University.
- Sarah Wise, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London.
Its inevitable that I would be drawn into doing some work about cycling – I live in a small market town that is overrun by crazy people donning lycra and heading to the hills. The Tour de Yorkshire is the latest in a series of major cycle events that is coming through my town this weekend. We were lucky enough to be on the route of Le Grand Depart back in July 2014, an event that did bring out the entire community. While, we can muse about who actually comes to these events – they involve public money so therefore should be accessible and attended by all sections of society, right? – we don’t actually know for sure. This was the purpose of some work that I did with 
This paper presents an agent-based ‘monocentric’ model: assuming only a fixed location for firms, outcomes closely parallel those found in classical urban economic models, but emerge through ‘bottom-up’ interaction in an agent-based model. Agents make buying and movement decisions based on a set of simple costs they face from their current location. These spatial costs are reduced to two types: the costs of moving people and goods across geographical distances and the costs (and benefits) of ‘being here’ (the effects of being at a particular location such as land costs, amenities or disamenities). Two approaches to land cost are compared: landlords and a ‘density cost’ proxy. Emergent equilibrium outcomes are found to depend on the interaction of externalities and time. These findings are produced by looking at how agents react to changing four types of cost, two spatial and two non-spatial: commuting, wage, good cost and good delivery. The models explore equilibrium outcomes, the effect of changing costs and the impact of heterogeneous agents, before focusing in on one example to find the source of emergence in the externalities of agent choice. The paper finishes by emphasising the importance of thinking about emergence as a tool, not an end in itself.