The GSA would like to welcome Dr. Dawn Parker to our last Pub Lecture Series talk this term. It will be taking place at the Grad House, Tuesday April 2nd at 4pm. Details below:
My evolution as a computational social scientist: An unexpected journey down a rugged path
In this talk, I describe my journey from traditional economist to an economist-geographer-computer scientist hybrid scholar pursuing new methods in complex systems research. First, I discuss the general problem that motivated my search for new methodological approaches as a graduate student—how spillover effects between land users affect the temporal and spatial evolution of patterns of land use and land value. I then briefly review the complex systems paradigm and the agent-based modeling approach I have employed to address my modeling challenge. I describe the evolution of my modeling approach over time, from a very simplistic modified cellular automaton model with homogeneous agents, written in Mathematica, to a more complex model of land markets with heterogeneous buyers and sellers, written in Netlogo/R, to our current model with multiple market elements and actors, written in Java/Repast/R. For each model, an example of a key novel finding and its implications for policy/planning is discussed. I further discuss the evolution of my research from myself as sole designer and coder to the leader of a fairly large team, where “we” means “My grad student or post-doc did the technical work”. If time allows, I will also briefly introduce our new research project, which strives to build a model of the concurrent evolution of residential land markets and transportation mode choice in Waterloo Region, with the goal of investigating the possible effects of the new LRT and demographic trends on patterns of model choice, residential development and land values in K-W. In the Q and A, I will also be happy to discuss the challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary scholarship in a novel scientific area.
Dr. Parker will be our last speaker this term so please come join us for a casual seminar and a cool beverage. Hope to see you there!
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