A course primarily for college professors and instructors who want to add individual-based modeling to their teaching and research skills
Individual-based (or "agent-based") models (IBMs, ABMs) are a popular new technique for understanding how the dynamics of a complex system emerge from the characteristics and behaviors of its individual components and their environment, but they also have important advantages for real-world management problems.
Currently, it is not easy for most professors to teach students how to use IBMs. This technique requires skills that few of us have training in, and until now, there have been no textbooks. This course will introduce Agent-based and Individual-based Modeling: A Practical Introduction (2012; Princeton University Press), a textbook designed for classes in which even the instructors are new to IBMs/ABMs.
Topics to be covered include:
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when and why to use IBMs, for both theoretical and applied science;
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strategies for designing models that are "as simple as possible, but not simpler";
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software techniques: programming IBMs, testing software, and running simulation experiments;
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model analysis and publication: how to produce science once a model is built; and
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linking your empirical research to individual-based science.
The Instructors
The course will be led by Volker Grimm and Steve Railsback, the authors of Agent-based and Individual-based Modeling; and Steve Lytinen.
Grimm and Railsback also wrote Individual-based Modeling and Ecology (2005) and have led many graduate-level courses on individual- and agent-based modeling over the past decade.
Volker Grimm is a researcher in the Department of Ecological Modelling, Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany, and associate professor at the University of Potsdam. He has supervised numerous IBM-based research projects and graduate students, and has written many influential publications on the "how" and "why" of individual-based modeling.
Steve Railsback is an adjunct professor in the Department of Mathematics at Humboldt State University and an ecological modeling consultant. He has developed and applied a variety of individual-based ecological models, with research focusing on theory for individual behavior.
Steve Lytinen is a professor of computer science in DePaul University's College of Computing and Digital Media. He has expertise in agent-based software, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Photo: The instructors -- also known as the "Three Heroes of Helsinki"
The course will use NetLogo, a software platform that greatly reduces the effort and expertise to program and use IBMs. NetLogo is free, extremely well designed and documented, widely used in science, and great fun. At the end of the course, participants should know NetLogo well enough to build basic models, teach themselves to become expert, and use the textbook to lead a class effectively.
The primary audience of this course is university professors and instructors who are considering teaching a class in individual-based modeling. Others (e.g., graduate students, scientists wanting to use IBMs in research) will be considered as space allows.
The course instructors are ecologists, and many of the examples used in the class will be ecological, but the textbook is interdisciplinary and participants from other fields are welcome.
Apply
The course fee ($600) will include instruction, lunches, and some social events. The fee does not include transportation or lodging. Participants will arrange their own lodging. See Travel for more information.
To enhance the course's effectiveness, we limit it to approximately 25 participants.
Please apply as soon as possible and no later than May 1, 2017.
Use the online application form below to apply for the course.
You will be notified of your status by May 8, 2017. After you are offered a space in the workshop, the College of eLearning & Extended Education will contact you to complete the registration process. Registration and full payment will be due by June 1, 2017.
If you need earlier notification to secure funding, etc., please apply early and contact us to request earlier notification.
For more information click "Further official information" below.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://www2.humboldt.edu/ibm/