CS382:Unit-compsoc

Computational Sociology with Agent Based Modeling

Background reading, one or more pointers/documents and a brief synopsis of what's covered in them

• Computational Sociology (wikipedia)
• The Structural Dynamics of Corruption: Artificial Society Approach
• Macro And Micro Dynamics In An Artificial Society: An Agent Based Approach
• Artificial Societies, Virtual Worlds and the Shared Problems and Possibilities of Emergence
• Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
• Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up (book citation)
• Tutorial on Agent Based Modelling (potential reading?) (Nate has the actual pdf) ACM Digital Library
• Computational Sociology and Agent Based Modeling

Lecture notes - outline form

• What is Agent Based Modeling?
  • Game of Life
  • Emergent Behavior
  • Axtell and Epstein - Growing Artificial Societies
  • What are its advantages and disadvantages?
• Where is it useful?
  • Economics
  • Sociology
  • Biology
  • Information Science
• Some Examples
  • Boids
  • Self Assembling of Information on networks
  • Sugarscape

Lab activity - materials, process and software

Self Assembling of Information on networks

Tie this in with facebook/myspace/<social network here (virtual or real)>. Who do you know? Draw a graph of your best friends, good friends, acquaintances, less-than-acquaintances and follow the coloring/sizing of the model. Does this model resemble what emerges in the model? Do several runs of the model and match their emergent stages against your drawing. Discuss validity of model based on this.

• Model

• brian castellani sociology and complexity web
  • Modeling social mobility. Paper, too
• Center for Models of Life - CMOL: Models / Interactive Java Applets
  • A model of information and dominance, Related paper
  • Modeling self organization of communication and topology in social networks

Scheduling - early, late, dependencies on other units, length of unit

Timing

Should certainly come after mathematical modeling. Other than that I don't think it matters.

Length

Two weeks. It's important and there's a lot of good stuff to do.

Archived stuff

Big Idea: you can model societies using Agents. Demonstrate that models of large sociological concepts (information flow, fashion, popularity) can be arrived at by modeling local agent interaction. Models first -> formulas second instead of other way around. Artificial Societies map into virtual worlds; map into real world; validate/verify can be done locally. Agent based modeling is not just SS, so learning ABM is inroad to other disciplines.

Big topics:

• Economics
• Information
• Politics