Mason-Smithsonian Joint Project on Climate and Society
This project employs agent-based models to investigate how human communities in Africa and the northern hemisphere respond to changing climate. The two regions under study include the greatest number of people at risk of death, disease, or displacement (Subsaharan Africa) and areas where the largest biophysical effects are taking place and affecting the largest portion of world GDP (Circumboreal Regions).
Its goals are to apply computational thinking in the form of advanced multiagent systems and evolutionary computation (EC) to understanding the complexity of nonlinear dynamics in soci-ecological systems subject to climate change, and to promote the transformative computational paradigm in anthropology, political science – social sciences in general – and Earth system science via tightly integrated multiagent systems (MAS), agent-based models (ABM), general cirulation climate models (GCCMs), and evolutionary computation (EC) algorithms. The integrated application of the MASON multiagent system and the ECJ evolutionary computation system (MASON+ECJ) is new and will enable understanding of nonlinear dynamics in complex socio-natural systems combining anthropology, political science, and Earth system science.
PI: Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Ph.D.
Team: Dr. Sean Luke, Dr. Paul Schopf, Dr. J. Daniel Rogers
This project is funded by the US National Science Foundation, CDI program, grant number IIS-1125171, and by the Center for Social Complexity.