Displaying 10 of 23 results for "Douglas Wright" clear search
I am a first year PhD student interested in applying ABM to understand the effect of formalizing property rights on the governance of land and natural resources.
agent-based modeling
social science simulation
computational economics
Modeling land use change from smallholder agricultural intensification
Agricultural expansion in the rural tropics brings much needed economic and social development in developing countries. On the other hand, agricultural development can result in the clearing of biologically-diverse and carbon-rich forests. To achieve both development and conservation objectives, many government policies and initiatives support agricultural intensification, especially in smallholdings, as a way to increase crop production without expanding farmlands. However, little is understood regarding how different smallholders might respond to such investments for yield intensification. It is also unclear what factors might influence a smallholder’s land-use decision making process. In this proposed research, I will use a bottom-up approach to evaluate whether investments in yield intensification for smallholder farmers would really translate to sustainable land use in Indonesia. I will do so by combining socioeconomic and GIS data in an agent-based model (Land-Use Dynamic Simulator multi-agent simulation model). The outputs of my research will provide decision makers with new and contextualized information to assist them in designing agricultural policies to suit varying socioeconomic, geographic and environmental contexts.
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.
land use; land management; agricultural systems; ecosystem function; carbon; remote sensing; field measurements; unmanned aerial vehicle; human decision-making; erosion, hydrological, and agent-based modelling
Associate Professor
School of Management Science and Engineering, Shandong Technology and Business University (Yantai 264005, P. R. China)
Ph. D. Degree, 09/2009 – 07/2015
School of Economics and Management, Beihang University (P. R. China)
M. A. Degree, 09/2003 – 02/2006
The Institute of Systems Engineering, Dalian University of Technology (P. R. China)
B. A. Degree, 09/1999 – 07/2003
Department of Information and Control Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (P. R. China)
Visiting Scholar at GECS – Research Group of Experimental and Computational Sociology (March, 2017 – February, 2018)
Università degli Studi di Brescia (Italy)
Co-supervisor: Professor Flaminio Squazzoni
Summer school in ‘Agent-based modeling for social scientists’ (September 4-8, 2017)
University of Brescia, Italy
Instructors: Flaminio Squazzoni, Simone Gabbriellini, Nicolas Payette, Federico Bianchi
The Santa Fe Institute’s Massive Open Online Course: Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling (Jun 5 – September 8, 2017)
The Santa Fe Institute, Complexity Explore Web: abm.complexityexploer.org
Instructors: Bill Rand
Summer school in ‘Complex systems and management’ (July 2-12, 2012)
National Defense University, P. R. China
Instructors: Xinjun Mao, Yongfang Liu, Dinghua Shi, Qiyue Cheng
Routine dynamics, Agent-based modeling, Computational social/organization science, Industrial systems engineering, etc.
Networks Theory, Applied Microeconomics, Industrial Organization and Social Interactions.
Becky is a Research Associate at the Imperial Centre for Energy Policy and Technology (ICEPT). She investigates economic, social and technical aspects of energy policy in the UK and abroad.
Becky’s current research is focussed on transitions in the UK bioenergy system and on biofuels for aviation. She is involved with two major projects: Bioenergy Value Chains: Whole Systems Analysis and Optimisation, an EPSRC SUPERGEN Bioenergy Challenge Project; and Renewable Jet Fuel Supply Chain Development and Flight Operations (RENJET), a project for EIT Climate-KIC. Becky has also worked on projects for the UK Energy Research Centre – International Renewable Energy Agency (UKERC-IRENA) collaboration, investigating issues such as economic value creation, policy evaluation metrics, innovation theory and rural electrification. She is particularly interested in the role of renewable technologies for developing countries, having lived and worked in Mali and Senegal.
I’m a trained philosopher, but, besides conceptual problems, I care for conclusions based on systematic observations and I also care for the applicability of those conclusions. One might say that I wish I were a behavioral economist, or maybe an ethologist/behavioral ecologist.
Displaying 10 of 23 results for "Douglas Wright" clear search