CfP: Geosimulation and Big Data: A Marriage made in Heaven or Hell?

23 Oct 2014

Call for papers, AAG 2015. Chicago. April 21 – 15, 2015.

Geosimulation and Big Data: A Marriage made in Heaven or Hell?

Update: this session has now been timetabled by the conference organisers. A list of speakers is available on Andrew Crooks’ GIS and Agent-Based Modelling blog.

In recent years, human emotions, intentions, moods and behaviours have been digitised to an extent previously unimagined in the social sciences. This has been in the main due to the rise of a vast array of new data, termed ‘Big Data’. These new forms of data have the potential to reshape the future directions of social science research, in particular the methods that scientists use to model _and simulate _spatially explicit social systems. Given the novelty of this potential “revolution” and the surprising lack of reliable behavioural insight to arise from Big Data research, it is an opportune time to assess the progress that has been made and consider the future directions of socio-spatial modelling in a world that is becoming increasingly well described by Big Data sources.

We invite methodological, theoretical and empirical papers that that engage with any aspect of geospatial modelling and the use of Big Data. We are particularly interested in the ways that insight into individual or group behaviour can be elucidated from new data sources – including social media contributions, volunteered geographical information, mobile telephone transactions, individually-sensed data, crowd-sourced information, etc. – and used to improve models or simulations. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Using Big Data to inform individual–based models of geographical systems;

  • Translating Big Data into agent rules;

  • Elucidating behavioural information from diverse data;

  • Improving simulated agent behaviour;

  • Validating agent-based models (ABM) with Big Data;

  • Ethics of data collected _en masse _and their use in simulation;

Please e-mail the abstract and key words with your expression of intent to Nick Malleson (n.malleson06@leeds.ac.uk) by 28 October, 2014. Please make sure that your abstract conforms to the AAG guidelines in relation to title, word limit and key words and as specified at:

http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers.

For further details see: http://mass.leeds.ac.uk/aag2015-geosimulation-bigdata/