will be speaker at Friday’s CSS Colloquium. LMI is a not-for-profit government consultancy based in Tysons, VA. Brant is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Computational Social Science at George Mason University. Brant’s talk entitled “The Pedagogy of Zombies: A Case Study of Agent-Based Modeling Competitions for Introducing Complexity, Simulation, and its Real-World Applications” (abstract below) is scheduled to begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.
This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA
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, October 26th.
Abstract: Complexity is pervasive in our daily lives and while academic programs exist to explore, interpret, experiment with, and apply these concepts to better understand the mechanics of our social world, the field is yet to be widely recognized in the mainstream consciousness. Are there engaging instructional methods and tools that can leverage a lower barrier to entry and indoctrinate new scholars into the science of complexity? In this Halloween-themed talk, I present a use case of a simulation modeling competition (and its evolution over several years) that provided preprogrammed agent-based models of a zombie apocalypse. Participants were challenged to explore and formalize human agent behaviors that leveraged their environment and other human agent-agent interactions to hide, evade, and otherwise prevent a grisly human extinction. I will describe the successes and challenges of this experience and a selection of the most creative solutions. I then go on to describe how this competition concept was extended to contemporary challenges that highlighted for participants potential real-world use cases that included combating the zika virus, and fisheries enforcement by the US Coast Guard. I hope for this talk to initiate dialog for how we might continue similar efforts to more easily introduce and propagate the complexity perspective.