• January 15, 2020: The special issue entitled “Meeting Grand Challenges in Agent-based Complex Systems” at The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) has come out! See this link for the special issue.

• December 27, 2018: ABM 17 leaders Drs. Li An, Volker Grimm, and Billie L. Turner II are working hard on the special issue entitled “Meeting Grand Challenges in Agent-based Complex Systems” at The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). We have received confirmation from 11 authors (not including 2 undecided authors) who intend to contribute to this special issue. See this site for submission detail.

• May 14, 2018: ABM 17 leaders Drs. Li An, Volker Grimm, Billie L. Turner II, and Robert Axtell proposed to launch a special issue entitled “Meeting Grand Challenges in Agent-based Complex Systems” at The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). Recently JASSS Editor-in-Chief Dr. Flaminio Squazzoni and the editorial board approved the special issue proposal. See this site for detail.

• November 04, 2017: Thanks to Dr. Wenwu Tang, a paper entitled “Code Reusability and Transparency of Agent-based Modeling: Perspectives and Challenges” has been submitted to the Annals of Association of American Geographers. This paper is authored by Wenwu Tang, Volker Grimm, Leigh Tesfatsion, Eric Shook, David Bennett, Li An, Zhaoya Gong, and Xinyue Ye. This is a great accomplishment!

• August 15, 2017: Thanks to Dr. Wenwu Tang and his group, a paper entitled “ABM Code Reusability and Transparency” (first full draft) has come out. This is part of the ABM 17 accomplishment and outcomes. Now the paper is under internal preview and review, and the related comments will be returned to the authors before it is submitted to a peer-review journal for publication.

• July 10, 2017: Per Dr. Li An’s request, PhD candidate Jie Dai is taking over the reimbursement issues. He has prepared and submitted most of the reimbursement forms and receipts to SDSU Research Foundation, while contacting some participants (including note takers for the $200 reward) for additional documents.

• May 31, 2017: The ABM 17 Symposium was followed by eight papers on a set of ABM-related topics (the first draft due on August 1, 2017) as below:

–Human decision making in ABM: Dawn Parker (dcparker@uwaterloo.ca) and and Alison Heppenstall (a.j.heppenstall@leeds.ac.uk)

–ABM code reusability and transparency: Wenwu Tang (wtang4@uncc.edu)

–Structural Validation: Martin Cenek (mcenek@alaska.edu)

–Embracing Uncertainty: David O-Sullivan (dosullivan@berkeley.edu) and Dan Brown (danbrown@umich.edu)

–Sensitivity Analysis: Arika Ligmann-Zielinska (ligmannz@msu.edu)

–Big data HPC ABM: Shaowen Wang (shaowen@illinois.edu)

–Integrated H-E ABMs: Tom Evans (evans@indiana.edu)

–Methodological issues of spatially explicit ABMs: Steve Manson (manson@umn.edu)

• April 22, 2017: The ABM 17 symposium was successfully closed at lunch time on Saturday. The symposium had around 100 participants from North America, Asia, and Europe, involving lots of exciting and inspiring discussions, poster presentations, and oral presentations! The two keynote speeches were great highlights of the symposium. The Friday Banquet and award ceremony was a climax, in which every participant had a chance to say one or several exciting things in the past year, and awards (including certificates) were given to PEA and ABM 17 Star recipients. After the symposium, we received many enthusiastic feedback and encouragements–here are examples of feedback we received so far (quotes from post-symposium email messages and the survey forms we received):

–“Thank you very much for the wonderful symposium…illuminating discussions…Again, it was a wonderful experience and I am immensely grateful to you and your whole excellent team for enabling this”

–“It was a real pleasure and the discussions were quite fruitful. You and your team were great hosts and if these papers come to fruition then it will be a wonderful measurable success”

–“Great job by organizers and SDSU team”

–“A most enjoyable and interesting Symposium. You did an outstanding job of organizing and running it”.

• April 11, 2017: The starting date of ABM 17 symposium is quickly approaching, and we are happy to announce that a set of great sessions have been finalized, which will be led by prominent ABM scientists as below:

–Human decision making in ABM (Alison Heppenstall as session chair and paper leader; with help from Dawn Parker);

–ABM code reusability and transparency (Marco Janssen and Michael Barton as session chairs; Wenwu Tang as paper leader);

–Model validation and verification (Daniel G. Brown as session chair; Arika Ligmann-Zielinska as paper leader);

–Big data high performance ABM (Shaowen Wang as session chair and paper leader);

–Integrated human-environment ABMs (Billie L. Turner II , Tom Evans, Peter Deadman as session chairs and paper leaders);

–Methodological issues of spatially explicit ABMs (Steve Manson as session chair and paper leader).

• March 31, 2017: The poster requirements are available now. For detail visit this site.

• March 30, 2017: The ABM 17 Executive Committee has carefully reviewed all the poster abstracts in order to select several oral presenters. Our selection criteria are quality of abstract, diversity of disciplines, and equity of participants at all levels. Congratulations to Gabriela Bucini, Martin Cenek, Atesmachew Hailegiorgis, Sheng Li, Susan Piacenza, and Shang Wu! They have been selected to present orally after they make their poster presentation.

• March 10, 2017: Congratulations to Nazia Arbab, Martin Cenek, Atesmachew Hailegiorgis, Kenan Li, Sheng Li, and Garry Sotnik! These six people have been selected as the ABM Professional Enhancement Award (PEA) recipients. The selection is made primarily on the basis of the quality of each applicant’s poster abstract and answers to our PEA questions, with consideration of diversity in career stage, gender, and discipline.

• February 12, 2017: The ABM 17 symposium is honored to have Drs. Robert Axtell and Volker Grimm to be our keynote speakers. See this page for more information about them.

• February 10, 2017: The ABM 17 symposium’s executive committee has sent to its science committee a request for a 2nd survey and a position paper to better plan and organize the symposium. The 2nd survey and position paper are expected to be turned in by February 28 and March 10, respectively.

• January 30, 2017: Our symposium will be held at San Diego Marriott Mission Valley after search and negotiation with a few candidate hotels. For more detail please read here.

• January 19, 2017: According to the 1st survey of the ABM 17 symposium, the executive committee of ABM 17 decided to select the following six sub-topics to be discussed and addressed in our symposium:

Human decision making in ABM

ABM code reusability and transparency

Model validation and verification

Big data high performance ABM

Integrated human-environment ABMs

Methodological issues of spatially explicit ABMs

• October 03, 2016: Our dates for the ABM 17 symposium have finally been set at April 20-22, 2017 based on the poll we did. The information about our science committee has been updated based on the comments from each committee member. We also received lots of enthusiastic comments, encouraging suggestions, and best wishes about this workshop!

• September 01, 2016: This is our project’s official kick-off date, and a poll is sent to all science committee members for the best dates to hold the symposium. Also THIS project website has been started with help from our technical administrator Marcus Chiu and student assistant Evan Casey.

• June 23, 2016: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided to fund our proposal “ABM’17: The Usefulness, Uselessness, and Impending Tasks of Agent-Based Models in Social, Human-Environment, and Life Sciences” submitted by Li An, Sigrunn Eliassen, Elena Irwin, Piotr Jankowski, Steven Manson, B. L. Turner II, and Shaowen Wang (by alphabetical order of last name). This is a symposium project that aims to advance the science of agent-based modeling (ABM). The NSF code for this project is BCS 1638446.