The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
While we have explored disasters in the past through agent-based models and other computational social science approaches, one area we have not explored is how one can use agent-based models to explore evacuations durring a wild fire event. This …
Continue reading »Human mobility datasets are essential for investigating human behavior, mobility patterns, and traffic dynamics. In the past we have written about how one can use agent-based models to generate patterns of life trajectories datase…
Continue reading »As part of the GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium at the 2026 AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California we have a call for papers for sessions entitled “Geosimulation and Its Emerging Directions with AI”Call for Papers:Simulating past, present, an…
Continue reading »In a previous post we talked about the potential of Generative AI for urban modeling, keeping with this theme at the 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), Na Jiang, Boyu Wang and myself had a poster entitled&n…
Continue reading »In the past we have written about how one can study urban shrinkage with a specific emphasis on Detroit from both an agent-based modeling perspective and also from analyzing newspapers through natural language processing Keeping with the theme of…
Continue reading »In the current issue of Environment and Planning B, we (Boyu Wang, Na Jiang and myself) have a new editorial entitled “Generative AI and Urban Modeling”. The premise of this editorial is that Generative AI (GenAI) is impacting all aspects of …
Continue reading »I have just gotten back from attending the 19th International Conference on Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM) in London and thought I would share the two papers we presented at the conference. The first paper was…
Continue reading »This is a slightly different post to normal, in the sense its not really about papers but my take on agent-based modeling, urban analytics and the growth of Artificial Intelligence impacting both. First up, while I was in Santa Fe last October for…
Continue reading »In the past we have explored how social media can be used to delineate earthquakes, study human-wildlife interactions, understand urban morphology, urban smells or locating wildfires among many other things. Keeping with …
Continue reading »Readers might of noticed that recently we have been exploring the use of street view images to explore cities or how we can utilize geosocial media to understand the form of function of cities, but one thing we have not explored is the role o…
Continue reading »As the AAG has just wrapped up I thought I would write brief (well actually quite long) post on the talks that I was involved with at the conference. These talks would not have been possible without the many great students and colleagues who I have bee…
Continue reading »Last year we put out a call for abstracts for presentations for our sessions Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges. The session description is as follows: There is an urgent need for research that promotes sustainab…
Continue reading »In the past I have blogged about disasters, but mainly from a social media or agent-based modeling perspective. However, after the devastating wildfires that impacted parts of Los Angeles County earlier this year led me to wonder how resilient are citi…
Continue reading »We are delighted to announce a special track on “Integrating Large-Language Models and Geospatial Foundation Models to Enhance Spatial Reasoning in ABMs” as part of the Social Simulation Conference 2025, 25th to 29th August 2025 at Delft University of …
Continue reading »In previous posts we have noted how one can explore urban issues through newspapers, while at the same time we have used social media to explore trends in vaccinations. In a recently published paper in PLOS Digital Health entitled “From print to p…
Continue reading »In previous posts, we have written how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can be used in various urban analytical applications. We have kept exploring this potential especially with respect to citizen science applications. To this end we have…
Continue reading »This past week we attended the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in Washington DC. At the AGU we presented two abstracts. The first follows on our work with respect to using synthetic populations within agent-based models. This work wa…
Continue reading »In numerous posts, we have been discussing synthetic populations and their use in agent-based modeling. But there are many modeling styles that also utilize synthetic populations. In our own work we often spend significant amounts of time creating…
Continue reading »While in the past we have written about how we can use agent-based models to capture basic patterns of life, and even developed a simulations, but until now we have never really demonstrated how we go about this. However, at the SIGSPATIAL 2024 c…
Continue reading »In the past we have written about the use of synthetic populations and their use in agent-based models. We are finding such synthetic populations to be extremely useful in the creation or initialization of agent-based models. To give you a sense of how…
Continue reading »Just a quick post, In recently released Encyclopedia of Human Geography edited by Barney Warf we were asked to write a short chapter entitled “Agent-based Models and Geography” In the chapter we discuss how over the last several decades, age…
Continue reading »In the past we have explored how agent-based modeling can be used to study vaccine uptake and what is the mechanism underlying the diffusion of different vaccine opinions in hybrid spaces (e.g., physical, relational and cyber) can affect individua…
Continue reading »The effects of educational attainment on individuals and society have been the subject of much research. However, there is still a need to study what factors matter the most, and what is worth investing more time and resources into, and how new methods…
Continue reading »Building upon last year’s successful sessions related to geosimulation, were various topics and issues from across the urban, social and environmental fields and the resulting application areas. More excitingly, we are witnessing the emergence of the …
Continue reading »Lineage distribution of SARS-CoV-2 across geographic regions of Ontario, Canada, Western New York, and New York City over timeIn the past we have posted on using agent-based models for explore the spread of diseases. We have been keeping up with this w…
Continue reading »Last week I had the honor to give a keynote talk entitled “Exploring the World from the Bottom Up with GIS and Agent-based Models: Past, Present and Future” at the 19th annual Social Simulation Conference which is the European Social Simulation Associa…
Continue reading »In the past we have wrote about using simulation to build synthetic datasets for trajectory analysis due to the limited availability of real world comprehensive datasets. In relation to this work we (Andreas Züfle, Dieter Pfoser, Carola…
Continue reading »Call for Abstracts! At the 2024 American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting to be held during the 9th to 13th of December in Washington, D.C., Carter Christopher, Wenwen Li, Gautam Thakur and myself are organizing a session entitled: “…
Continue reading »In the recent edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place edited by Mary Gilmartin, Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin and Sue Roberts, I was asked to write a chapter about Mike Batty. While I have known Mike for a while, to say writing …
Continue reading »In the past we have explored various ways to explore vaccine hesitancy and keeping with this theme we have a new paper published in PLOS ONE entitled “Understanding the determinants of vaccine hesitancy in the United States: A comparison of social surv…
Continue reading »Looker room layouts (Source: Gao et al., 2024)One of my favorite winter activities is skiing and now that all the skiing places in the North East have closed (for those interested Killington, VT closed last Saturday), I thought it would be interes…
Continue reading »Its hard to believe that Environment and Planning B (EPB) is turning 50. To celebrate the fact, we have a special issue. Among the many number of contributed commentaries and editorials Mike Batty discusses the history of the journal, and I h…
Continue reading »In past blog posts we have discussed how one can use social media to study vaccine discussions and even tried to build a very simple disease model where vaccination rates were a factor in the spread of an outbreak. However, when it comes to vaccination…
Continue reading »At the recent American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, our group had several presentations showcasing some of the research we are doing here at the University at Buffalo with respect to agent-based modeling, social …
Continue reading »At the upcoming American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, we (Alison Heppenstall, Na (Richard) Jiang, Gary Polhill, Andrew Crooks, Raja Sengupta, Suzana Dragicevic, Sarah Wise, Jeon-Young Kang) have organized 3 sessi…
Continue reading »In the past we have blogged about the challenges of agent-based modeling but one thing we have not written much about is the challenge of uncertainty especailly when it comes to model calibration. This uncertainty is a challenge when it when it co…
Continue reading »Quantifying community resilience especially after a disaster is an open research challenge. However, with the growth in mobility datasets such as SafeGraph we are being given new opportunities to study how communities rebound from disaster. &…
Continue reading »Over the last year or so there has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) like ChatGPT. In a recent editorial in Environment and Planning B…
Continue reading »Over the years, we have been creating synthetic populations that try and mimic the populations which we are trying to study. To some extent this fits a large research area which has become known as Agent-Based Computational Demography (ABCD). As …
Continue reading »In the past on this site we have written about how one can use social media to study the world around us. Often the focus has been on Twitter but that is not the only social media platform available. Another is Flickr, and while in past posts hav…
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