Oral Defense of Doctoral Dissertation – Computational Social Science – Standardizing Complexity: Doctrine and Computation for Integrated Campaigning – Thomas Dietrich Pike

Notice and Invitation
Oral Defense of Doctoral Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Social Science
Department of Computational and Data Sciences
College of Science
George Mason University

Thomas Dietrich Pike
Bachelor of Arts, University of Arizona, 1999
Master of Arts, American Military University, 2009
Master of Science, National Intelligence University, 2010

Standardizing Complexity: Doctrine and Computation for Integrated Campaigning

Friday, June 21, 2019, 1:00 a.m.
Research Hall, Room 92

All are invited to attend.

Committee
Robert Axtell, Chair
Patrick Gillevet
William G. Kennedy

This dissertation examines the integration of complexity theory and computational tools into U.S. foreign policy. It identifies ways to improve the Department of Defense’s main analytic framework to ensure a more accurate reflection of complex systems and it provides a holistic assessment of the integration of computational tools into Joint campaigns. Based on this analysis, this dissertation advocates the incorporation of Agent Based Models (ABMs) as simulations to support both analysis and foreign policy development at all levels of the foreign policy enterprise. To aid this integration two Mesa based ABM libraries are provided. (1) Multi-level Mesa, the first Python based multi-level library to facilitate the integration and evolution of layered adaptive networks. This library goes beyond existing multi-level libraries by providing greater user flexibility and allowing for the integration and adaption of more complex networks. (2) Distributed Space Mesa, a first attempt at starting a Distributed Mesa meta-library. This library provides modest time improvements to spatial Mesa ABMs and critical lessons for the continued development of a suite of distributed Mesa libraries.