CS382:Unit-compsoc

Socioeconomic modelling. what happens with changes in legislation eg taxes, min wage. model of population behavior. (agent)

• Computational Sociology (wikipedia)
• 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
  • Self-Assembling of Information in Networks
• 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)

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

(tangential thought: should our units be different modeling strategies/technologies (numbers/formulas with octave/matlab, agent-based, (non)graphical) with disciplines in each one?)

Pros:

• Token non-natural science unit, get non-natural sciences students involved
  • Touch an emerging field, we can tell people there's a lot to be discovered yet here
• Talk about agent-based modeling

Cons:

• Less numerically-based
• We need to be careful about not stepping on social science's toes

Comments:

• Need to decide on a particular area to go forward with
• Economics is currently very mathematically-based, could do something along these lines
  • Could also do something on a smaller scale in class, see a hands on social interaction or how played out