Calendar

With the proliferation of location-aware mobile devices and the emergence of everyday analytics, geospatial technology now spans every market, crosses national boundaries, and affects every trending issue. There is no doubt that cloud-based solutions are increasing in demand, requiring next generation, customizable technology to harness multisource data and transform it into focused solutions to be consumed by users of every level. The M.App Portfolio platform is designed to create smart, lightweight, customized market applications that address unique business and industry problems by combining geospatial analytics with cloud technology, as well as enterprise-level deployment environments. These applications, known as Hexagon Smart M.Apps, link sophisticated analytics and spatial models to geospatially relevant information, conveying data about solutions through intuitive, customizable, interactive and innovative displays. In this presentation, you will see several Smart M.Apps in action to better understand how this platform is changing the way we visualize, interpret, and interact with spatial information. Learn how Hexagon Geospatial has teamed with the World Antiquities Coalition to use Smart M.App technology to track missing and stolen cultural artifacts. See how the Green Space Analyzer provides a new way for decision makers to influence policy. Understand how a Smart M.App helps count endangered species in Africa. See how Smart M.Apps address the problems of refugee camps and can be used in country-wide census. Hexagon Geospatial’s technology provides the ability to address the challenge of linking business information with multisource multi-sensor data, in near real-time to answer questions and make decisions about our dynamically changing Earth.

“Industry 4.0” is shorthand for what the World Economic Forum calls “the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The invention of the steam engine and construction of railroads brought the first industrial revolution in the 18th century. A second industrial revolution began in the 19th century with the advent of mass production. Digital computers heralded a third industrial revolution beginning in the 1960s. Today, the drivers of Industry 4.0 include “a ubiquitous and mobile internet, smaller, cheaper, and more powerful sensors, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.” Industry 4.0 is manifest in an Internet of Things that’s connecting billions of devices, and is likely to attract trillions in spending, in the coming decade. Many IoT devices “know where they are can act on their locational knowledge.” Foresman’s and Luscombe’s proposed Second Law of Geography claims that spatially enabled things have increased financial and functional utility. This increased utility, they argue, creates the basis for a spatially enabled economy.

However, other thought leaders worry that the Fourth Industrial Revolution may threaten many of today’s workers with “technological unemployment.” Not just the IoT, but international finance, social media, other human activities generate an unprecedented and ever-increasing volume, velocity and variety of data. Some foresee that human analysts and their employers will rely increasingly on machine learning and artificial intelligence to cope with the data deluge. Many already do. A body of research by economists, tech leaders, and forward-looking historians anticipates fundamental disruption of traditional employment by increasingly capable machines. This presentation will consider the implications of the IoT, and broader trends in data-driven discovery, for GIS work and workforce development.

Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /
Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences

Robert Axtell, Professor
Computational Social Science Program,
Department of Computational and Data Sciences
College of Science
and
Department of Economics
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
George Mason University
Are Cities Agglomerations of People or of Firms? Data and a Model
Friday, September 28, 3:00 p.m.
Center for Social Complexity, 3rd Floor Research Hall
All are welcome to attend.
Abstract:  Business firms are not uniformly distributed over space. In every country there are large swaths of land on which there are very few or no firms, coexisting with relatively small areas on which large numbers of businesses are located—these are the cities. Since the dawn of civilization the earliest cities have husbanded a variety of business activities. Indeed, often the raison d’etre for the growth of villages into towns and then into cities was the presence of weekly markets and fairs facilitating the exchange of goods. City theorists of today tend to see cities as amalgams of people, housing, jobs, transportation, specialized skills, congestion, patents, pollution, and so on, with the role of firms demoted to merely providing jobs and wages. Reciprocally, very little of the conventional theory of the firm is grounded in the fact that most firms are located in space, generally, and in cities, specifically. Consider the well-known facts that both firm and city sizes are approximately Zipf distributed. Is it merely a coincidence that the same extreme size distribution approximately describes firm and cities? Or is it the case that skew firm sizes create skew city sizes? Perhaps it is the other way round, that skew cities permit skew firms to arise? Or is it something more intertwined and complex, the coevolution of firm and city sizes, some kind of dialectical interplay of people working in companies doing business in cities? If firm sizes were not heavy-tailed, but followed an exponential distribution instead, say, could giant cities still exist? Or if cities were not so varied in size, as they were not, apparently, in feudal times, would firm sizes be significantly attenuated? In this talk I develop the empirical foundations of this puzzle, one that has been little emphasized in the extant literatures on firms and cities, probably because these are, for the most part, distinct literatures. I then go on to describe a model of individual people (agents) who arrange themselves into both firms and cities in approximate agreement with U.S. data.

Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences
Gonzalo Castañeda
Visiting Scholar, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science
George Mason University/Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE), México
 How do governments determine policy priorities?
Studying development strategies through spillover networks
Friday, October 5, 3:00 p.m.
Center for Social Complexity, 3rd Floor Research Hall
All are welcome to attend.
Abstract: Determining policy priorities is a challenging task for any government because there may be, for example, a multiple objectives to be simultaneously attained, a multidimensional policy space to be explored, inefficiencies in the implementation of public policies, interdependencies between policy issues, etc. Altogether, these factors generate a complex landscape that governments need to navigate in order to reach their goals. To address this problem, we develop a framework to model the evolution of development indicators as a political economy game on a network. Our approach accounts for the –recently documented–network of interactions between policy issues, as well as the well-known political economy problem arising from budget assignment. This allows us to infer not only policy priorities, but also the effective use of resources in each policy issue. Using development indicators data from more than 100 countries over 11 years, we show that the country-specific context is a central determinant of the effectiveness of policy priorities. In addition, our model explains well-known aggregate facts about the relationship between corruption and development. Finally, this framework provides a new analytic tool to generate bespoke advice on development strategies.

To facilitate open communication with all College of Science faculty, Dean Agouris is continuing to offer open door sessions periodically throughout the academic year.

Ideal topics for these faculty walk-in appointments include:

• new faculty introductions
• ideas for growth
• sharing research, teaching, or service activities
• multidisciplinary collaboration opportunities

Dean Agouris will also be holding additional open door sessions on the following dates in Exploratory Hall 3200:

• October 24, 2018
• November 14, 2018
• November 27, 2018
• December 12, 2018
• January 15, 2019
• February 12, 2019
• February 27, 2019
• April 16, 2019
• March 27, 2019
• May 8, 2019
• May 21, 2019

Call ahead notification is not required. Just check in with Teri Fede in Suite 3200 Exploratory Hall (Fairfax) or at  IABR 3006 (SciTech).  If a queue forms during these periods, she will allocate time accordingly for those requesting it.

Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /
Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences

Maciej Latek, Chief Technology Officer, trovero.io./
Ph.D. in Computational Social Science 2011
George Mason University
Industrializing multi-agent simulations:
The case of social media marketing, advertising and influence campaigns
 
Friday, October 12, 3:00 p.m.
Center for Social Complexity, 3rd Floor Research Hall
All are welcome to attend.
Abstract:  System engineering approaches required to transition multi-agent simulations out of science into decision support share features with AI, machine learning and application development, but also present unique challenges. In this talk, I will use trovero as an example to illustrate how some of these challenges can be addressed.
As platform to help advertisers and marketers plan and implement campaigns on the social media, trovero is comprised of social network simulations for optimization and automation and network population synthesis used to preserve people’s privacy while maintaining a robust picture of social media communities. Social network simulations forecast campaign outcomes and pick the right campaigns for given KPIs. Simulation is the only viable way to reliably forecast campaign outcomes: Big data methods fail to forecast campaign outcomes, because they are fundamentally unfit for social network data. Network population synthesis enables working with aggregate data without relying on data sharing agreements with social media platforms that are ever more reluctant to share user data with third parties after GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica debacle.
I will outline how these two approaches complement one another, what computational and data infrastructure is required to support them and how workflows and interactions with social media platforms are organized.
 
 
 
 

Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /
Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences

 
 
Ken Kahn, Senior Researcher
Computing Services
University of Oxford

Agent-based Modelling for Everyone

Friday, October 19, 3:00 p.m.
Center for Social Complexity Suite
3rd Floor Research Hall
All are welcome to attend.
Abstract: Agent-based models (ABMs) can be made accessible to a wide audience. A wonderful example is the Parable of the Polygons (https://ncase.me/polygons/) based upon Schelling’s segregation model. The challenge isn’t simply to provide an interactive simulation to the general public but to convey how the model works and what assumptions underlie it. The speaker has been involved in three efforts to do more than make the models but understandable but also to enable people without computer programming experience to get a hands-on understanding of the process of modelling. One project attempted to model the 1918 Pandemic in a modular fashion so learners could understand and modify the model. Another was the Epidemic Game Maker which was created for a Royal Society science exhibition. Finally a generic browser-based system for creating ABMs by composing and customising pre-built “micro-behaviours” will be described. All of these systems will be demonstrated.
Bio:  Ken Kahn is a researcher at the University of Oxford. He led the Modelling4All Project (modelling4all.org) for ten years. He built the Behaviour Composer which provides a high-level interface to NetLogo.

To facilitate open communication with all College of Science faculty, Dean Agouris is continuing to offer open door sessions periodically throughout the academic year.

Ideal topics for these faculty walk-in appointments include:

• new faculty introductions
• ideas for growth
• sharing research, teaching, or service activities
• multidisciplinary collaboration opportunities

Dean Agouris will be holding additional open door sessions on the following dates in Exploratory Hall 3200:

• October 24, 2018
• November 14, 2018
• November 27, 2018
• December 12, 2018
• January 15, 2019
• February 12, 2019
• February 27, 2019
• April 16, 2019
• March 27, 2019
• May 8, 2019
• May 21, 2019

Open door sessions will also be held at 3006 IABR on the SciTech Campus on the following dates from 10:30-12:30pm:

• October 9, 2018
• January 30, 2019
• February 19, 2019

Call ahead notification is not required. Just check in with Teri Fede in Suite 3200 Exploratory Hall (Fairfax) or at  IABR 3006 (SciTech).  If a queue forms during these periods, she will allocate time accordingly for those requesting it.

From Cyanobacteria Blooms to Clear Water: The Remarkable Story of the Tidal Potomac River Recovery

By: Dr. Christian Jones,  Professor and Director, Potomac Environmental Research and Education Center, George Mason University

About the Galileo’s Science Café Series

Hear about the latest findings surrounding hot topics in science and medicine that affect our everyday lives and the decisions that we make. Bring your family and friends for a free, casual, interactive science discussion. Learn from the experts and speak with them personally.

Brought to you by the College of Science at George Mason University.

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