The Dresden University of Technology will conduct its 10th annual summer school in agent/individual-based modeling, June 30 through July 10, 2016. The instructors will be Uta Berger, Volker Grimm, and Steven Railsback. The course will be held in the scenic village of Holzhau, Germany. Applications are due in February, 2016.

This year the course will again be an ‘advanced’ class, designed for graduate students and researchers who have already made some progress on an agent-based model for a specific research problem—at least a written model description and working draft software. Participants will submit a description of their draft model before the course starts, and the course will then focus on important strategies for overcoming common obstacles and successfully completing the participants’ model-based research.

The course will convey skills and experience in the analysis and application of individual- and agent-based modeling to scientific problems. Analysis includes debugging, parameter fitting, sensitivity analysis, and robustness analysis. Model application includes handling uncertainties in data, designing simulation experiments, and statistical analysis of results. Guidance for publication success will be provided by instructors who edit prominent modeling journals. The course will include lectures, extensive hands-on exercises, and group projects to be presented at the end of the course. Instruction will use NetLogo as a modeling platform, and R and Excel for analysis and statistics; but participants are welcome to use other platforms.

Additional information and the application form are at: http://tu-dresden.de/forst/summerschool