Alison Heppenstall
I am a lecturer in Geocomputation within the Centre for Spatial Analysis and Policy, School of Geography, at the University of Leeds, UK where I am also deputy director of the Centre for Computational Geography. I am a former Chair of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) GIS group, but now have jumped ship to the RGS Quantitative Methods Research Grouph (QMRG) where I was elected as an ordinary committee member in July 2012. Along with Dr Andy Evans, I founded the Multi-Agent and Social Simulation (MASS) group.
I’m currently working with Dan Olner , Gordon Mitchell and Malcolm Sawyer on the ESRC funded Geo-spatial Restructuring of Industrial Trade project. Previous projects I have worked on (as PI or Co-I) include Modelling Individual Consumer Behaviour (ESRC) GeNeSiS (ESRC), Emerging Sustainabilities (EPSRC) and SECSE (EPSRC).
My main interest is in the development and application of agent-based models. In particular I’m interested in simulating human behaviour. I’ve been involved in Research in the areas of education, retail systems, crime, health and archaeology. I’m also interested in using different techniques such as microsimulation, spatial interaction models, genetic algorithms and neural networks.
I am actively involved in the NCRM research node TALISMAN which is based at Leeds. I both develop and deliver teaching and training on a range of geo-spatial methods. My teaching is closely linked to my research, current modules that I teach are Principles of GIS, Web-based GIS and Geocomputation.