Proc. Agent 2004 Conf. on Social Dynamics : Interaction, Reflexivity and Emergence
I'd like to welcome you to the Agent 2004 conference. As most of you are aware, this conference is the fifth in a series of meetings that began in 1999. A conference followed the next year in 2000. The 2001 conference was skipped because of some conflicts with other conferences, and the conferences have proceeded annually since then. We have the proceedings of the previous conferences available here on CDs. One CD has the proceedings from 1999, 2000, and 2002; the other contains last year's proceedings. The purpose of these conferences is to advance the state of the computational social sciences and to integrate the social sciences with the decision sciences and something that is traditionally known as the management sciences. Those of you in the operations/research area are familiar with the traditional school of modeling simulation that emerged from that scientific area. This conference will bring together a different group of people to talk about the topic of agent-based theories and simulations. This fifth agent conference is one of a group of conferences held annually around the country. Most of you are probably aware of the CASOS Conference held at Carnegie Mellon University, usually in July. UCLA holds the Arrowhead Conference, generally around May. The University of Michigan is now holding a conference as well. Of course everyone is aware of SwarmFest, which has been held annually for about a decade. The Swarm seems to 'swarm' in different locations each year. As you're well aware, this conference is organized into a three-day program. This is the first time we've used three days for the full conference setting. Last year, we held simultaneous sessions, and that didn't work well for most of those who attended. We had complaints from people who missed sessions and papers because of scheduling, so we decided to extend this year's conference by one day. As a result, we now have a program designed to present the papers in a serial sequence rather than in a parallel manner. Today, we'll focus on toolkits. Tomorrow we'll look at computational social theory, and Saturday is application day. We'll talk about how we're taking some of the theories and toolkits to look at real-world problems in order to understand how our very complex world works and maybe even to predict how it might work in the future. In addition to the content of the papers themselves, one of the more important things about this conference is the discussion that is inspired by these papers. I invite you to ask penetrating questions, offer insightful comments, share your experiences with toolkits or your ideas on theories, and help to create an atmosphere that will help this field move along and grow. It's a fairly new science--it is just emerging--but it seems to have been gaining momentum in the last couple of years. This is a conference to get your energy going and perhaps foster your creativity. With that, I welcome you to Agent 2004; have a great time at the conference.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-31-109-Eng-38
- OSTI ID:
- 939907
- Report Number(s):
- ANL/DIS-05-6; TRN: US200823%%439
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Agent 2004 Conf. , Argonne, IL, Oct. 7 - 9, 2004; Related Information: Co-sponsored by Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Chicago in association with North American Assoc. for Computational Social and Organizational Science
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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