4 December. 2007 @ 1600

NCG Seminar

Conference Room, Third Floor, John Hume Building, NUI Maynooth.

"Using geospatial agents to explore riot dynamics"
Dr. Paul Torrens Assistant Professor, School of Geographical Sciences, Arizona State University

Paul Torrens is Assistant Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University and an Affiliate in the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity. He holds a Ph.D. from University College London (2004), Master's degrees from Trinity College Dublin (1999) and Indiana University (1998), and a Bachelor's degree from Trinity College Dublin (1996). His research is focused on Geographic Information Science and development of geosimulation and geocomputation tools, applied modeling of complex urban systems, and new emerging cyberspaces. His projects have been supported by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Herberger Foundation, Science Foundation Arizona, Autodesk, Inc., and Alias Research. His work earned him a CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2007. (See http://geosimulation.org for more details.)

Abstract

Rioting and civil violence are sources of social and cultural upheaval and present a significant threat to public safety and health worldwide. Yet, we know relatively little about the basic behavioral science that drives and shapes rioting for individuals or among collectives. Riot phenomena are almost impenetrable to academic inquiry because their flashpoints are relatively impromptu in space and time. Even when organized a priori, planning of such events is often hidden from the public and law enforcement. Riots are destructive and consume any post hoc evidence of their genesis or progression. Participants of crowd insurrection are mostly unavailable for standard qualitative inquiry based on survey or interviews, making the collection of data for quantitative analysis or statistical inference difficult or impossible. In such instances, we may turn to simulation as an experimental laboratory for exploring phenomena that are otherwise relatively impenetrable to academic inquiry. In this talk, I will describe the development and application of a new approach to modeling small-scale geographies of riot dynamics. A synthetic simulation laboratory, created from first principles will be demonstrated, replete with autonomous agent-actors, each endowed with life-like emotional and social characteristics and driven by behavioral engines and geospatial AI that replicate known behaviors in the real world or are used to test theories, ideas, and hypotheses in new and unforeseen contexts. A suite of analytical tools based around space-time GIS is used to measure activity spaces of riot participants in silico and provides an opportunity for simulations to be mined based on agent behavioral signatures. Together, these tools are used to build and test theory about the functioning of complex adaptive systems in space and time, and the relationship between human behavior, social setting, and the built environment in scenarios of civil violence and protest.

Tuesday 4th December, 4pm, Hume Building Conference Room, Third Floor.