Hello,

My name is Roberto and I am a graduate student at The Pennsylvania State University. I am in the “Information Sciences - Cybersecurity and Information Assurance program”, through which I discovered my interest in ABM. I am conducting my capstone research project on how to make ABM more effective in the disaster recovery planning process of IT companies. I am currently looking for interview candidates to conduct my research. If you or anyone you know have experience using ABM for disaster recovery planning in IT or tech, please reach out!

I learned about ABM through the Intelligent Agents course at Penn State, where we modeled everything from terrorist attacks to social relationships. I was immediately interested in ABM due to the potential and capabilities that it provides in so many areas. I hope to make ABM more popular in IT disaster recovery planning through my research, while learning more about ABM myself.

I am a lowly civil servant moonlighting as a PhD student interested in urban informatics, Smart Cities, artificial intelligence/machine learning, all-things geospatial and temporal, advanced technologies, agent-based modeling, and social complexity… and enthusiastically trying to find a combination thereof to form a disseration. Oh… and I would like to win the lottery.

I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK.

Guido Fioretti, born 1964, graduated in Electronic Engineering in 1991 at La Sapienza University, Rome. In 1995, he received a PhD in Economics from this same university. Guido Fioretti is currently a lecturer of Organization Science at the University of Bologna.

The goal of my research program is to improve our understanding about highly integrated natural and human processes. Within the context of Land-System Science, I seek to understand how natural and human systems interact through feedback mechanisms and affect land management choices among humans and ecosystem (e.g., carbon storage) and biophysical processes (e.g., erosion) in natural systems. One component of this program involves finding novel methods for data collection (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles) that can be used to calibrate and validate models of natural systems at the resolution of decision makers. Another component of this program involves the design and construction of agent-based models to formalize our understanding of human decisions and their interaction with their environment in computer code. The most exciting, and remaining part, is coupling these two components together so that we may not only quantify the impact of representing their coupling, but more importantly to assess the impacts of changing climate, technology, and policy on human well-being, patterns of land use and land management, and ecological and biophysical aspects of our environment.

To achieve this overarching goal, my students and I conduct fieldwork that involves the use of state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in combination with ground-based light detection and ranging (LiDAR) equipment, RTK global positioning system (GPS) receivers, weather and soil sensors, and a host of different types of manual measurements. We bring these data together to make methodological advancements and benchmark novel equipment to justify its use in the calibration and validation of models of natural and human processes. By conducting fieldwork at high spatial resolutions (e.g., parcel level) we are able to couple our representation of natural system processes at the scale at which human actors make decisions and improve our understanding about how they react to changes and affect our environment.

Moira Zellner’s academic background lies at the intersection of Urban and Regional Planning, Environmental Science, and Complexity. She has served as Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator in interdisciplinary projects examining how specific policy, technological and behavioral factors influence the emergence and impacts of a range of complex socio-ecological systems problems, where interaction effects make responsibilities, burdens, and future pathways unclear. Her research also examines how participatory complex systems modeling with stakeholders and decision-makers can support collaborative policy exploration, social learning, and system-wide transformation. Moira has taught a variety of courses and workshops on complexity-based modeling of socio-ecological systems, for training of researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers in the US and abroad. She has served the academic community spanning across the social and natural sciences, as reviewer of journals and grants and as a member of various scientific organizations. She is dedicated to serving the public through her engaged research and activism.