You will work on a project, funded by the European Research Council, called Data Assimilation for Agent-Based Models (DUST). The project is developing agent-based computer simulations that can be used to model social phenomena – such as disease spread, traffic congestion, or crowding in busy public places – in real-time, with the aim of providing valuable, up-to-date information to decision makers. Agent-based modelling is an ideal methodology for this type of simulation but has rarely been used to make real-time predictions. Hence there is an opportunity to develop models that are able to incorporate real-time data to make their short-term predictions more accurate.

You will contribute to one of three alternative project work streams depending on your interests and expertise: (i) agent-based diffusion models that can adapt to new data in real time to model infectious disease transmission or the spread of political ideas; (ii) public transport models that can provide up-to-date delay estimates in a complex, noisy transport system; and (iii) economic agent-based models that can adapt to rapidly changing social and economic conditions.

The research team is lead by Dr Nick Malleson and will be located within the School of Geography and the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA), both of which are emerging as international centres of excellence in agent-based modelling. The city of Leeds is already recognised as a hub for big data analytics in business, health care and academic research. In addition, the University is a partner in the Alan Turing Institute, which is the UK’s national institute for artificial intelligence and data science, offering exciting opportunites to for researchers to engage with scientific leaders from a range of fields.

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact:

Professor Nick Malleson
Tel: +44 (0)113 343 5248
Email: n.s.malleson@leeds.ac.uk