Talk from the AAG

The last few days I have been attending the  Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Boston. A common theme at the AAG sessions I attended  (to me at least) seemed to  be the rise of new sources of data which give us new ways to explore geographical problems and the challenges of working with bigger data sets. Perhaps where this was most explicitly expressed were in the Geographic Data Science sessions which was pitched to be at the nexus of data science and geography.

While at the meeting I participated in a panel under the theme of “Geographic Data Science“, and as part of the Symposium on Human Dynamics in Smart and Connected Communities, I co-organized two sessions entitled Agents – the ‘atomic unit’ of social systems? which also included Agent-Bingo.  Finally I and gave a presentation of our current research at Mason, entitled “Megacities through the Lens of Computational Social Science“, more details can be seen below. For those wanting to know more on the synthetic population generation, click here.

Geographic Data Science Panel
Megacities through the Lens of Computational Social Science


Abstract:

Currently there are over 35 megacities, cities with over 10 million inhabitants, and the number of such cities are expected to grow in the coming years. These habitats represent many challenges from an agent-based modeling perspective. Their size and density, the diverse behaviors of their inhabitants, and their evolving social network of communities along with multiple interacting subsystems need to be understood, captured and modeled. To capture and link the dynamics that shape and form these systems, we must grapple with them in their entirety. While there have been many models applied to specific subsystems of megacities (e.g. traffic, disease spread, urban growth etc.) their interactions often go untouched.
The lens of computational social science (CSS), the interdisciplinary science of complex social systems and their investigation through computational modeling and related techniques can be used to understand and model megacities. Given the advances in computational power and the availability of fine scale datasets, what are the opportunities offered to us with respect to exploring megacities? In an attempt to answer this question we will demonstrate how new sources of data (e.g. volunteered geographical information) can be fused with more traditional data (e.g. census data) to create the basis of a megacity model both in terms of its physical environment and its social environment. We will then show results from a simulated disaster explores how people potentially react and behave to the evolving crisis within a megacity.

Keywords: Megacities, GIS, Agent-based modeling, Social Networks, Behavior

Full References:

Crooks A.T., Kennedy W.G., Burger, A. Oz, T. and Heppenstall, A. (2017), Megacities through the Lens of Computational Social Science, The Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, 5th-9th, April, Boston, MA. (pdf)