WICI Talk – Discovering the Themes of Complexity Science in Land Use Modelling

As an affiliate member of the Waterloo Institute of Complexity and Innovation (WICI), I was invited to give a talk in their on-going speaker series. In an effort to relate my research back to the foundations of WICI and more broadly complexity science, I provided some context about my perspective on research as a geographer with a focus on spatial analysis and land systems, gave a 3-slide introduction to agent-based modelling, described some past research in terms of heterogeneity and interaction (a couple themes of complexity science) and then spent some time describing where my current research program is headed.

Waterloo Complexity Institute on Vimeo

During these talks I never seem to provide appropriate accolades to those who contributed to my research along the way and sometimes I even forget coauthors! The key person who should have been mentioned in the talk is Dr. Daniel Brown of the University of Michigan as well as those who I collaborated with on the SLUCE and SLUCEII projects. The network analysis images were created by Junyi Wang, who is currently completing a Masters in our Geography and Environmental Management program at Waterloo. Dr. Andrew Bell and I have been working on publishing a paper titled “Modular ABM development in NRM for improved dissemination and training”, which argues for the need to publish smaller blocks of model code, which we describe as Agent Modelling Primitives or Land Use Modelling Primitives. Andrew constructed the authorship network diagrams shown in the presentation. Toward the end of the presentation I discussed some future work using GPGPUs and failed to mention explicitly the research being completed by Mikola Lysenko and Roshan M. D’Souza, which is very exciting and for open access to one of their papers you can look to JASSS.