I am part of the Participatory Systems initiative at the Delft University of Technology. I’m currently working on my PhD project, which concerns the role of local information and stories to empower and engage citizens in their neighbourhoods. I study and use playful and creative approaches to enable the participation of children, youngsters, and adults in my research. My research interests are in research through design, citizen engagement, empowerment, and social design.

I am an agent-based modeller at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland. I specialise in large-scale modelling of social and socio-ecological systems, with a particular focus on simulating stressors and process that could give rise to transformational change. To date, my research has focused on food and agricultural systems, rural economies, and the WASH sector, with much of it informed by firsthand fieldwork in Africa, Asia, and Europe. I am also interested in leveraging open science, participatory research, quantitative ethnography, and grounded theory within modelling processes to collaboratively generate nuanced insights into individual behaviour and societal dynamics. I received the Open Science Award from the International Land Use Study Centre in 2023 for such work. I currently co-lead the European Social Simulation Association’s Special Interest Group on Modelling Transformative Change and I am the Associate Director of the Centre for Empirical Agent-Based Modelling at the James Hutton Institute.

My initial training was in cadastre and geodesy (B.Eng from the Distrital University, UD, Colombia). After earning my Master’s degree in Geography (UPTC, Colombia) in 2003, I worked for the “José Benito Vives de Andreis” marine and coastal research institute (INVEMAR) and for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Three years later, in 2006, I left Colombia to come to Canada, where I began a PhD in Geography with a specialization in modelling complex systems at Simon Fraser University (SFU), under the direction of Dr. Suzana Dragicevic (SAMLab). In my dissertation I examined the topic of spatial and temporal modelling of insect epidemics and their complex behaviours. After obtaining my PhD in 2011, I began postdoctoral studies at the University of British Columbia (2011) and the University of Victoria (2011-2013), where I worked on issues concerning the spatial and temporal relationships between changes in indirect indicators of biodiversity and climate change.

I am a computational archaeologist with a strong background in humanities and social sciences, specialising in simulating socioecological systems from the past.

My main concern has been to tackle meaningful theoretical questions about human behaviour and social institutions and their role in the biosphere, as documented by history and archaeology. My research focuses specifically on how social behaviour reflects long-term historical processes, especially those concerning food systems in past small-scale societies. Among the aspects investigated are competition for land use between sedentary farmers and mobile herders (Angourakis et al. 2014; 2017), cooperation for food storage (Angourakis et al. 2015), origins of agriculture and domestication of plants (Angourakis et al. 2022), the sustainability of subsistence strategies and resilience to climate change (Angourakis et al. 2020, 2022). He has also been actively involved in advancing data science applications in archaeology, such as multivariate statistics on archaeometric data (Angourakis et al. 2018) and the use of computer vision and machine learning to photographs of human remains (Graham et al. 2020).

As a side, but not less important interest, I had the opportunity to learn about video game development and engage with professionals in Creative Industries. In one collaborative initiative, I was able to combine my know-how in both video games and simulation models (\href{https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92843-8_15}{Szczepanska et al. 2022}).

Dr. Aaron Bramson is principal investigator of the AI Strategy Center of GA technologies in Tokyo, Japan, as well as an Affiliate Researcher in the Department of General Economics of Ghent University in Belgium. His research specialty is complexity science, especially methodologies for modeling complex systems. Research topics span across disciplines: measures of polarization and diversity, belief measure interoperability, integrating geospatial and network analyses for measuring walkability and neighborhood identification, and myriad applications in artificial intelligence and data visualization. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in a joint program with the departments of Political Science and Philosophy as well as an M.S. in Mathematics from Northeastern University.

Hello,

My name is Roberto and I am a graduate student at The Pennsylvania State University. I am in the “Information Sciences - Cybersecurity and Information Assurance program”, through which I discovered my interest in ABM. I am conducting my capstone research project on how to make ABM more effective in the disaster recovery planning process of IT companies. I am currently looking for interview candidates to conduct my research. If you or anyone you know have experience using ABM for disaster recovery planning in IT or tech, please reach out!

I learned about ABM through the Intelligent Agents course at Penn State, where we modeled everything from terrorist attacks to social relationships. I was immediately interested in ABM due to the potential and capabilities that it provides in so many areas. I hope to make ABM more popular in IT disaster recovery planning through my research, while learning more about ABM myself.

About me
Name: Dr. Julia Kasmire
Position: Post-doctoral Research Fellow
Where: UK Data Services and Cathie Marsh Institute at the University of Manchester.
Short Bio
2004 - BA in Linguistics from the University of California in Santa Cruz, including college honours, departmental honours and one year of study at the University of Barcelona.
2008 - MSc in the Evolution of Language and Cognition from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on the effects of various common simulated population features used when modelling language learning agents.
2015 - PhD from Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at the Delft University of Technology under the supervision of Prof. dr. ig. Margot Wijnen, Prof. dr. ig. Gerard P.J. Dijkema, and Dr. ig. Igor Nikolic. My PhD thesis and propositions can be found online, as are my publications and PhD research projects (most of which addressed how to study transitions to sustainability in the Dutch horticultural sector from a computational social science and complex adaptive systems perspective).
Additional Resources
Many of the NetLogo models I that built or used can be found here on my CoMSES/OpenABM pages.
My ResearchGate profile and my Academia.org profile provide additional context and outputs of my work, including some data sets, analytical resources and research skills endorsements.
My LinkedIn profile contains additional insights into my education and experience as well as skills and knowledge endorsements.
I try to use Twitter to share what is happening with my research and to keep abreast of interesting discussions on complexity, chaos, artificial intelligence, evolution and some other research topics of interest.
You can find my SCOPUS profile and my ORCID profile as well.

Master Degree

I discovered at the same time Agent-Based Modeling method and Companion Modelling approach during my master degrees (engeenering and artificial intelligence and decision) internship at CIRAD in 2005 and 2006 where I had the opportunity to participate as a modeller to a ComMod process (Farolfi et al., 2010).

PhD

Then, during my PhD in computer Science applied to Modeling and Simulation, I learned the Theory of Modeling and Simulation and the Discrete EVent System specification formalism and proposed a conceptual, formal and operational framework to evaluate simulation models based on the way models are used instead of their ability to reproduce the target system behavior (Bonté et al., 2012). Applied to the surveillance of Epidemics, this work was rather theoritical but very educative and structuring to formulate my further models and research questions about modeling and simulation.

Post-Doc

From 2011 to 2013, I worked on viability theory applied to forest management at the Compex System Lab of Irstea (now Inrae) and learned about the interest of agregated models for analytical results (Bonté et al, 2012; Mathias et al, 2015).

G-EAU

Since 2013, I’m working for Inrae at the joint The Joint Research Unit “Water Management, Actors, Territories” (UMR G-EAU) where I’m involved in highly engaging interdisciplinary researches such as:
- The Multi-plateforme International Summer School about Agent Based Modelling and Simulation (MISSABMS)
- The development of the CORMAS (COmmon Pool Resources Multi-Agents Systems) agent-based modeling and simulation Platform (Bommel et al., 2019)
- Impacts of the adaptation to global changes using computerised serious games (Bonté et al., 2019; Bonté et al. , 2021)
- The use of experimentation to study social behaviors (Bonté et al. 2019b)
- The impact of information systems in SES trajectories (Paget et al., 2019a)
- Adaptation and transformations of traditional water management and infrastructures systems (Idda et al., 2017)
- Situational multi-agent approaches for collective irrigation (Richard et al., 2019)
- Combining psyhcological and economical experiments to study relations bewteen common pool resources situations, economical behaviours and psychological attitudes.

Professor, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Professor, School of Complex Adaptive Systems
Affiliate Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration
Arizona State University