CfP AAG 2015 – Geosimulation and Big Data: A Marriage made in Heaven or Hell?

In recent years, human emotions, intentions, moods and behaviours have been digitised to an extent previously unimagined in the social sciences. This has been in the main due to the rise of a vast array of new data, termed ‘Big Data’. These new forms of data have the potential to reshape the future directions of social science research, in particular the methods that scientists use to model and simulate spatially explicit social systems. Given the novelty of this potential “revolution” and the surprising lack of reliable behavioural insight to arise from Big Data research, it is an opportune time to assess the progress that has been made and consider the future directions of socio-spatial modelling in a world that is becoming increasingly well described by Big Data sources.

We invite methodological, theoretical and empirical papers that that engage with any aspect of geospatial modelling and the use of Big Data. We are particularly interested in the ways that insight into individual or group behaviour can be elucidated from new data sources – including social media contributions, volunteered geographical information, mobile telephone transactions, individually-sensed data, crowd-sourced information, etc. – and used to improve models or simulations. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Using Big Data to inform individual–based models of geographical systems;
  • Translating Big Data into agent rules;
  • Elucidating behavioural information from diverse data;
  • Improving simulated agent behaviour;
  • Validating agent-based models (ABM) with Big Data;
  • Ethics of data collected en masse and their use in simulation;

Please e-mail the abstract and key words with your expression of intent to Nick Malleson by 28th October, 2014. Please make sure that your abstract conforms to the AAG guidelines in relation to title, word limit and key words and as specified at http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers. An abstract should be no more than 250 words that describe the presentation’s purpose, methods, and conclusions as well as to include keywords.

Organisers

  • Alison Heppenstall, School of Geography, University of Leeds
  • Nick Malleson, School of Geography, University of Leeds
  • Andrew Crooks, Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University
  • Paul Torrens, Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland
  • Ed Manley, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London

Timeline

  • 28th October, 2014: Abstract submission deadline. E-mail Nick Malleson <mailto:n.malleson06@leeds.ac.uk> by this date if you are interested in being in this session. Please submit an abstract and key words with your expression of intent.
  • 31st October, 2014: Session finalization and author notification
  • 3rd November, 2014: Final abstract submission to AAG, via www.aag.org<http://www.blogger.com/www.aag.org>. All participants must register individually via this site. Upon registration you will be given a participant number (PIN). Send the PIN and a copy of your final abstract to Nick Malleson<mailto:n.malleson06@leeds.ac.uk>. Neither the organizers nor the AAG will edit the abstracts.
  • 5th November, 2014: AAG registration deadline. Sessions submitted to AAG for approval.