Purpose

This discussion group was originally formed by members of the ECS Agents, Interaction and Complexity (AIC) group at the University of Southampton (and thus is one of a number of AIC collaboration initiatives), but is intended as a cross-faculty discussion group, in a similar vein to the university strategic research groups but much more 'lightweight' (and without fixed seminar series).

The idea for the group originated in connection with the Care Life Cycle (CLC) project, which brings together demographers, management scientists, operations researchers, and complexity scientists (EPSRC funding granted 2010). The CLC project involves using agent-based simulations, and other types of model, to try to understand some of the factors affecting the supply of, and demand for, health and social care in an ageing society. Planning these models led us to discuss issues such as

    • how to build models of social systems informed by (and contextualised within) existing theory and data;
    • how to integrate or compare models pitched at different levels of detail and perhaps with very different conceptual frameworks;
    • the purposes of such modelling (e.g., the extent to which prediction is a reasonable goal to aim at, and what we might define 'prediction' as);
    • how to make models policy-relevant, and how to engage with policy-makers.

However, it soon became clear that it's not only those of us working on the CLC project who are confronting these issues, so we thought we should open up these meetings to all who want to attend.

Content of Meetings

What do we actually do? The content is driven by what our members want to talk about. This might include members organising external speakers or doing 'polished' presentations of their own work, but can equally include speculative model-brainstorming, case studies of either impressive or flawed examples from the literature, demos/discussions of software tools, specific points of simulation methodology or just open-ended discussions based on something interesting that a member has recently seen.

We try to keep it informal with little 'management' overhead---we'd struggle to run it otherwise!---but ideally need members to volunteer topics to have some sort of part-filled schedule beforehand. (Some of our most interesting discussions have been ones where the meeting had no fixed agenda and discussion arose 'organically', but this doesn't always work and makes it hard for time-pressed members to judge whether to attend or not. As a compromise, we've recently started asking attending committee members to have 'fallback' topics ready, which we can advertise beforehand if there is no scheduled discussion-leader: see the How it Works page.)

Our record of meetings gives a feel for what we've previously discussed, but does not proscribe what we should discuss! We're particularly interested in having more discussions on non-agent-based approaches (or ways of conducting ABM outside of computer / complexity science).

Our 'Founder'

Jason Noble (formerly Senior Lecturer in ECS at Southampton) did most of the work setting up and running this group initially, but he left academia in summer 2014 to live the good life in Turkey and run a guest house. We wish him well, and suggest members consider this as a holiday destination when he's up and running!