Second Call for Abstracts: Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges at the 2024 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii between Tuesday, April 16 – Saturday, April 20, 2024

Session Description:

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 policymakers.

We are particularly interested in presentations that will discuss issues relating to:

Agent-based modeling and microsimulation techniques for responding to societal challenges; Agent-based models used for policy formation;
Data-driven modeling;
Utilizing machine modeling for geosimulation;
Creating really big models using exascale computation;
Model validation and assessment;
Participatory methods for agent-based modeling;
Approaches to connect and share (open source) data and models;
Revealing, quantifying, and reducing socio-economic inequalities with Geosimulation.

Next Steps:

If this sounds of interest, please e-mail the abstract and key words with your expression of intent to Richard Jiang (njiang8@buffalo.edu) by November 9th (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: https://aag.secure-platform.com/aag2024/page/abstracts/abstract-guidelines

An abstract should be no more than 250 words that describe the presentation’s purpose, methods, and conclusions.

Timeline:

9th November, 2023: Abstract submission deadline. E-mail Richard Jiang by this date if you are interested in being in this session. Please submit an abstract and key words with your expression of intent.
14th November, 2023: Session finalization and author notification
15th November, 2023: Final abstract submission to AAG, via https://aag.secure-platform.com/aag2024/. 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 Richard Jiang. Neither the organizers nor the AAG will edit the abstracts.
16th November, 2023: AAG registration deadline. Sessions submitted to AAG for approval.
16th -20th April 2024: AAG in Honolulu.

Organizers

Alison Heppenstall, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Na (Richard) Jiang, University at Buffalo, USA.
Gary Polhill, The James Hutton Institute, Scotland.
Andrew Crooks, University at Buffalo, USA.
Raja Sengupta, McGill University, Canada.
Suzana Dragicevic, Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Sarah Wise, University College London, England.
Jeon-Young Kang, Kyung Hee University, South Korea.