Palestrante: Prof. Armando Geller

Local: Auditório Oswaldo Fadigas Torres, CCE

Título: Multiagent modeling and simulation for and with stakeholders in areas
affected by armed conflict 

Abstract: Although important steps have been taken to unravel the emergence of
social conflict from the interactions of individual and group behavior as an
important ingredient to complex societies, convincing models are still
wanting. Recent evidence emphasizes pro-social behavior more than conflictuous
behavior and thus gradually shifts the explanandum from why cooperation occurs
to why cooperation breaks down. Being a basal configuration of social life, we
should continue working on developing a better understanding of how individual
decision making, social mechanisms and social organization are working
together in bringing about social conflict. To this goal a multiagent research
program contributes significantly, where agents can be equipped with rich
cognitive architectures and empirically informed microbehavior; relationships
between the micro and the macro can be made expressive; and socio-cognitive
macropatterns can be generated. The talk will draw on many of these issues
theoretically and by means of example. There will be a special emphasis on
evidence-driven and stakeholder oriented modeling and simulation of social
conflict. 

Short Bio (by himself):

I am a Computational Social Scientist at	 Scensei. Before that  I was
a Computational Social Scientist at Group W, and a Research Assistant
Professor at the Department of Computational Social Science and a
Research Fellow at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, both at
George Mason University, where I was the PI of a project on studying
irregular warfare using multiagent simulation. I have a doctoral
degree in political science from the University of Zurich. My
particular background is in conflict research and multiagent social
simulation. I came to George Mason University in early 2009 after a
two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Policy Modelling in
Manchester, UK. Before that I worked as a doctoral researcher at the
Swiss Military Academy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
and as a teaching assistant at the University of Zurich. I closely
collaborate with Maciek £atek.

My view of the world is multiagent: Actors interact with each other in
manifold contexts; from running to fighting to parenting. I am trained
in political science and computational social science, so I am
interested in analyzing and understanding the cultural, political and
social dimension of context behaviors; how people and organizations
make decisions and how they shape their environment. To do so I apply
data collection, data analysis, and social simulation techniques,
including participatory experiments, semantic concept mapping and
multiagent modeling. I work both academically and provide commercial
services at Scensei, an analytics enterprise. Our clients at Scensei
use our services to improve their own analytics and to make more
effective and sustainable decisions in complex adaptive environments.