Welcome to the first seminar of the fall semester.
The Research Colloquium on Computational Social Science/Data Sciences speakers for Friday, September 06, 2019, will be Ben Intoy, PhD and Dan Baeder from Deloitte Consulting LLP. Their talk, entitled “Massive-Scale Models of Urban Infrastructure and Populations,” will begin at 3:00pm in the Center for Social Complexity Suite (373-381) located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.
For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/
For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/
We hope to see you on Friday, September 06, 2019 at 3PM.
Abstract:
As the world becomes more dense, connected, and complex, it is increasingly difficult to answer “what-if” questions about our cities and populations. Most modeling and simulation tools struggle with scale and connectivity. We present a new method for creating digital twin simulations of city infrastructure and populations from open source and commercial data. We transform cellular location data into activity patterns for synthetic agents and use geospatial data to create the infrastructure and world in which these agents interact. We then leverage technologies and techniques intended for massive online gaming to create 1:1 scale simulations to answer these “what-if” questions about the future.
Bios:
Ben Intoy is a full stack developer at Deloitte Consulting LLP. He received his PhD in Physics at Virginia Tech in 2015 where he used high throughput computing simulations to study stability properties of cyclically competing species in varying spatial dimensions. After completing his PhD, Ben went to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus, as a postdoctoral research associate where he used tools he learned in his PhD to abstractly study the origin of life on earth and the probability of finding life elsewhere in the universe. In fall 2018, he took a position at the Deloitte Arlington, VA office to work on the FutureScape project (www.futurescape.ai).
Dan Baeder is a data scientist at Deloitte Consulting LLP, and has been on the FutureScape project since joining the firm last year. While at Deloitte, Dan focuses on the use of cellular phone geolocation data for the development of synthetic traffic models, as well as the application of geospatial analysis techniques to human behavior modeling. He is a noted R-phile in a sea of Python users. Dan received an MS in Public Policy and Management with a focus on data analytics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2018.