Displaying 10 of 93 results for "Alison Heppenstall" clear search
I studied Molecular Biology and Genetics at Istanbul Technical University. During my undergraduate studies I became interested in the field of Ecology and Evolution and did internships on animal behaviour in Switzerland and Ireland. I then went on to pursue a 2-year research Master’s in Evolutionary Biology (MEME) funded by the European Union. I worked on projects using computer simulations to investigate evolution of social complexity and human cooperation. I also did behavioural economics experiments on how children learn social norms by copying others. After my Master’s, I pursued my dream of doing fieldwork and investigating human societies. I did my PhD at UCL, researching cultural evolution and behavioural adaptations in Pygmy hunter-gatherers in the Congo. During my PhD, I was part of an inter-disciplinary Hunter-Gatherer Resilience team funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I obtained a postdoctoral research fellowship from British Academy after my PhD. I am currently working as a British Academy research fellow and lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology and Evolutionary Medicine at UCL.
I received my BSc, MSc, and PhD from the University of Nottingham. My PhD focuses on the Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation (ABMS) of Public Goods Game (PGG) in Economics. In my thesis, a development framework was developed using software-engineering methods to provide a structured approach to the development process of agent-based social simulations. Also as a case study, the framework was used to design and implement a simulation of PGG in the continuous-time setting which is rarely considered in Economics.
In 2017, I joined international, inter-disciplinary project CASCADE (Calibrated Agent Simulations for Combined Analysis of Drinking Etiologies) to further pursue my research interest in strategic modelling and simulation of human-centred complex systems. CASCADE, funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), aims to develop agent-based models and systems-based models of the UK and US populations for the sequential and linked purposes of testing theories of alcohol use behaviors, predicting population alcohol use patterns, predicting population-level alcohol outcomes and evaluating the impacts of policy interventions on alcohol use patterns and harmful outcomes.
I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Computational Epidemiology at Western Sydney University, School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Science where I am also a member of Translational Health Research Institute (THRI). I am a research associate at the Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney University and Adjunct Senior Lecturer at Psychiatry Monash Health, Monash University.
My work is in the areas of dynamic data-driven computer simulation and systems science. The product of my work is decision and research support software that applies agent and discrete event based models, and metaprogramming techniques to solve complex problems.
I am currently Chief Investigator (CI) on an international grant funded by Botnar foundation as well as on a MRFF funded grant with Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney and an Associate Investigator (AI) on Suicide Prevention Australia funded research at The University of Melbourne. In he last 5 years I have been CI on 7 grants and commissioned research projects and AI on 1 grant with total value of over $8 million AUD.
Agent based modelling and simulation.
Mental heath and wellbeing.
Primate evolutionary biologist and geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin
I conduct long-term behavioral and ecological field research on several species in the primate community of Amazonian Ecuador to investigate the ways in which ecological conditions (such as the abundance and distribution of food resources) and the strategies of conspecifics together shape primate behavior and social relationships and ultimately determine the kinds of societies we see primates living in. This is a crucial and central focus in evolutionary anthropology, as understanding the ways in which behavior and social systems are shaped by environmental pressures is a fundamental part of the discipline.
I complement my field studies with molecular genetic laboratory work and agent-based simulation modeling in order to address issues that are typically difficult to explore through observational studies alone, including questions about dispersal behavior, gene flow, mating patterns, population structure, and the fitness consequences of individual behavior. In collaboration with colleagues, I have also started using molecular techniques to investigate a number of broader questions concerning the evolutionary history, social systems, and ecological roles of various New World primates.
Modeling land use change from smallholder agricultural intensification
Agricultural expansion in the rural tropics brings much needed economic and social development in developing countries. On the other hand, agricultural development can result in the clearing of biologically-diverse and carbon-rich forests. To achieve both development and conservation objectives, many government policies and initiatives support agricultural intensification, especially in smallholdings, as a way to increase crop production without expanding farmlands. However, little is understood regarding how different smallholders might respond to such investments for yield intensification. It is also unclear what factors might influence a smallholder’s land-use decision making process. In this proposed research, I will use a bottom-up approach to evaluate whether investments in yield intensification for smallholder farmers would really translate to sustainable land use in Indonesia. I will do so by combining socioeconomic and GIS data in an agent-based model (Land-Use Dynamic Simulator multi-agent simulation model). The outputs of my research will provide decision makers with new and contextualized information to assist them in designing agricultural policies to suit varying socioeconomic, geographic and environmental contexts.
Kenneth D. Aiello is a postdoctoral research scholar with the Global BioSocial Complexity Initiative at ASU. Kenneth’s research contributes to cross disciplinary conversations on how historical developments in biological, social, and cultural knowledge systems are governed by processes that transform the structure, dynamics, and function of complex systems. Applying computational historical analysis and epistemology to question what scientific knowledge is and how we can analyze changes in knowledge, he uses text analysis, social network analysis, and machine learning to measure similarities and differences between the knowledge claims of individual agents and groups. His work builds on how to assess contested knowledge claims and measure the evolution of knowledge across complex systems and multiple dimensions of scale. This approach also engages in dynamic new debates about global and local structures of knowledge shaped by technological innovation within microbiology related to public policy, shrinking resources given to biomedical ideas as opposed to “translation”, and the ethics of scientific discovery. Using interdisciplinary methods for understanding historical content and context rich narratives contributes to understanding new domains and major transitions in science and provides a richer understanding of how knowledge emerges.
Angelos Chliaoutakis received his PhD in Electronic & Computer Engineering in 2020 at Technical University of Crete (TUC), Greece. During 2005-2020 he was a research assistant at the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of TUC, participating in several research projects associated with NLP, semantic similarity and ontology based information systems. Since 2010 he is also a research assistant at the Laboratory of Geophysical - Satellite Remote Sensing and Archaeo-environment (GeoSat ReSeArch Lab) of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of Foundation for Research and Technology (IMS-FORTH), were he is involved in various research projects related to the full-stack development of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), web-based GIS applications and Geoinformatics in the cultural and archaeological domain. This ultimately transformed his interest and research direction towards computational archaeology, in particular, agent-based modeling and simulation, while intertwining ideas and approaches from Artificial Intelligence, Multi-agent Systems and GIS.
Research activities range between Computer Science, Information Systems and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Agent-based modeling/simulation (ABM), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Geographical Information Science (GIScience).
As a data scientist, I employ a variety of ecoinformatic tools to understand and improve the sustainability of complex social-ecological systems. I also apply Science and Technology Studies lenses to my modeling processes in order to see potential ways to make social-ecological system management more just. I prefer to work collaboratively with communities on modeling: teaching mapping and modeling skills, collaboratively building data representations and models, and analyzing and synthesizing community-held data as appropriate. At the same time, I look for ways to create space for qualitative and other forms of knowledge to reside alongside quantitative analysis, using mixed and integrative methods.
Recent projects include: 1) Studying Californian forest dynamics using Bayesian statistical models and object-based image analysis (datasets included forest inventories and historical aerial photographs); 2) Indigenous mapping and community-based modeling of agro-pastoral systems in rural Zimbabwe (methods included GPS/GIS, agent-based modeling and social network analysis); 3) Supporting Tribal science and environmental management on the Klamath River in California using historical aerial image analysis of land use/land cover change and social networks analysis of water quality management processes; 4) Bayesian statistical modeling of community-collected data on human uses of Marine Protected Areas in California.
Dr. Roger Cremades is a complex systems scientist and heterodox global change economist integrating human-Earth interactions across systems and scales into modular quantitative tools, e.g. connecting drought risks in cities with land use at the river basin scale. He is elected Council member of the Complex Systems Society (2022-2025) and previously served as co-Chair of the Development Team of the Finance and Economics Knowledge-Action Network of Future Earth, the largest global research programme in global change (2020-2022). Roger coordinated research and co-production projects above €1M, and published in top journal like PNAS, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Geoscience. As a scientific modeler in the Social and Ecological Sciences, Roger integrates complex systems concepts into integrated assessment models of global change, with a focus on cities.
The future of CoMSES.Net, in Roger’s vision, is to augment its projection into a hub for discussing state-of-the-art approaches on modeling for the Social and Ecological Sciences, e.g. via bi-annual webinars, so that the Model Library becomes a lighthouse from where all communities developing, sharing, using, and reusing agent-based and other computational models also find valuable discussions to advance their research, education, and computational practice.
Global change, human-Earth interactions, complex systems.
I’ve been building cyberinfrastructure and research software for computational social science and the study of complex adaptive systems at Arizona State University since 2006. Past and current projects include the Digital Archaeological Record, the Virtual Commons, the Social Ecological Systems Library, Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments (SKOPE), the Port of Mars, and CoMSES Net, where I serve as co-director and technical lead.
I also work to improve the state of open, transparent, reusable, and reproducible computational science as a Carpentries instructor and maintainer for the Plotting and Programming in Python and Good Enough Practices for Scientific Computing lessons, currently co-chair the Consortium of Scientific Software Registries and Repositories and Open Modeling Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Working Group, and serve on the DataCite Services and Technology Steering Group and CSDMS’s Basic Model Interface open source governance council.
My research interests include collective action, social ecological systems, large-scale software systems engineering, model componentization and coupling, and finding effective ways to promote and facilitate good software engineering practices for reusable, reproducible, and interoperable scientific computation.
Displaying 10 of 93 results for "Alison Heppenstall" clear search