Please join us for the next Krasnow Monday Seminar on 10/22/12.
Refreshments will be served at 3:30pm. Come chat with colleagues
and like-minded researchers and students prior to the talk at 4pm.
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TITLE:
Modeling geographies of human behavior in critical scenarios
SPEAKER:
Paul Torrens
Geosimulation Research Laboratory
Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland
College Park, MD
DATE: Monday, Oct 22, 2012
TIME: 4:00 p.m.
LOCATION: Lecture Room (Room 229)
Krasnow Institute Building
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
ABSTRACT:
Putting people in the right place, at the right time, in the right
context, and in the right company is often a priority in critical
scenarios. These dimensions of human geography can be important in
determining people’s exposure to risk; in planning efficient
coverage for emergency response; in delivering services and
resources to populations during times of need; in assessing
potential demand and surges on system capacity; and in exploring
likely actions, reactions, and interactions of the population during
critical events. While significant, estimating and evaluating
realistic geographies of human behavior for critical events is a
difficult task—by their very nature, many facets of critical
situations may be novel, surprising, or unknown. Often, we may have
little ground truth or prior experience upon which to base our
decisions. In such cases, we often turn to computer modeling and
simulation, “in silico”, to explore plans, policies, hypotheses, and
ideas that are too difficult (or dangerous) to experiment with on
the ground, that have large elements of uncertainty, or that have
simply yet to happen. But, to be effective in supporting decisions
or plans, computer modeling needs to provide realistic
representations of human behavior, and it needs to do so in a manner
that is useful for a variety of scenarios and users. The current
state-of-the-art in computer modeling is mostly lacking in its
ability to provide these functionalities, focusing instead on
computational tractability and convenience, at the expense of
behavioral realism, with the result that the set of questions that
can be posed and answered in simulation is often artificially
constrained. In this talk, I will discuss how geosimulation has been
pioneered as an alternative scheme for representing human behavior
in simulation, with a focus on realism, extensibility, and
exploration. I will demonstrate the usefulness of the approach in a
variety of quotidian and critical scenarios, including crowd
evacuation dynamics, anti-social behavior during riot and protest,
and urban dynamics during earthquakes.
http://www.geosimulation.org
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For additional directions or information call 703-993-4333 or browse
to
http://krasnow.gmu.edu/location/ .
The full semester seminar schedule is at
http://krasnow.gmu.edu/blog/category/monday-seminars/upcomingmondayseminars/
.