It is time to elect the Management Committee of ESSA for the period September 2018 to September 2020. All ESSA members who are regularly registered as members in 2017/2018 will receive an email with instructions. Elections are open from 6 to 22 August 2018.
The Secretary has received the following applications for Management Committee positions:
There is one applicant for the post of President.
Gary Polhill has a background in Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks, and after a brief period in industry as a professional programmer, has worked in agent-based social simulation for over twenty years. He has worked on a number of international and interdisciplinary projects funded by the European Commission, the Scottish Government, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), and the Norwegian Research Council. He has applied social simulation to land use, biodiversity incentivisation, energy use, and everyday pro-environmental behaviour, as well as working on methodology and rigour around numerics, documentation, open modelling, ontologies and validation.
If re-elected, he intends to encourage inter-organization co-operation in education and research visits, with a view to furthering the institutional establishment of social simulation. He is also keen to foster the development of methodology, and following Nigel Gilbert’s suggestion in Dublin, to promote activities that consider research ethics in the context of social simulation.
There is one applicant for the post of Secretary.
Armando Geller is a co-founder of and partner at Scensei, an analytics and decision support boutique; BidElastic, a large-scale data mining, and simulation and optimization software development enterprise; positif.ly, a humanospherics venture; and trovero, a discovery, mapping and micro targeting tool for the social media. Previously, he worked as a historian, political scientist and computational social scientist in academia, government and private industry. He develops participatory tools and instruments for individual and small group data elicitation; creates applied multiagent models in security, development cooperation and industry; and uses modeling and simulation for stakeholder integrating decision support and policy design. He innovates, devises and leads complexity and multiagent inspired, cross-disciplinary research and applied projects for a broad range of popular as well as unconventional contexts. Armando is the current Secretary of ESSA and stands for reelection.
There is one applicant for the post of Treasurer.
Andreas Koch is Professor of Social Geography at University of Salzburg, Austria. He succeeded Michael Moehring as treasurer of ESSA since 2014. His field of research is geosimulation and the application of social simulation models in spatial contexts. He has hosted the 8th ESSA Conference in Salzburg in 2012. He is Vice President of ifz – International Research Center for Social and Ethical Issues at University of Salzburg and review editor of JASSS.
His purpose for the next mandate is to manage the financial running of the association in close cooperation with the President, the Secretary and all members of the MC to guarantee a sustainable development of the association.
There are ten applicants for membership of the Committee.
Diane Payne is an Associate Professor at the UCD School of Sociology and the Director of the Dynamics Lab- Centre for Computational Social Science in the UCD Geary Institute at the University College Dublin in Ireland. She co-ordinates the undergraduate and postgraduate training at UCD in computational social science and social data analytics. Her main research interests are political sociology and in particular behavioural models of group processes and collective decision making. She hosted the 2017 Social Simulation Conference at UCD, in Dublin, Ireland.
Her purpose for her mandate is to help ESSA improving its focus on teaching and learning.
Flaminio Squazzoni is Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Brescia, Italy, where he leads the GECS-Research Group on Experimental and Computational Sociology. He is editor of JASSS, which is owned by ESSA. His field of research is agent-based computational sociology. He has been former President of ESSA, from September 2012 to September 2016. He has hosted the 5th ESSA Conference in 2008 and the First ESSA Summer School in Social Simulation 2010 in Brescia, Italy
His purpose for the next mandate is to manage the relationship between the association and the journal.
Melania Borit is associate professor in social simulation and serious games at UiT – The Artic University of Norway. Being an interdisciplinary researcher, she has a wide range of research interests: social simulation, agent-based modelling, design of autonomous social agents; pedagogy and didactics in higher education, serious games/game-based learning; fisheries management. She is co-organizing two ESSA SIGs (Using qualitative data to inform behavioral rules; Social simulation and serious games) and has published articles in Journal of Cleaner Production, Trends in Food Science & Technology, and Fish and Fisheries. She was elected for the first time in the ESSA MC in 2016 and would be at her second mandate
The purpose of this second mandate is to continue the work with the ESSA newsletter as Newsletter editor.
Bogumił Kamiński is Head of Decision Analysis and Support unit at Warsaw School of Economics and Adjunct Professor at Data Science Laboratory, Ryerson University, Toronto. His research interests focus on applications of agent-based modeling, especially in economics, and development of methods for analysis of simulation experiments results. He has been elected for the first time MC member of ESSA in 2014 and 2016.
His purpose for his mandate is to support application of SSC conferences organization guidelines, manage ESSA-EU-ORG GitHub repository, and promote formal methods of design and analysis of simulation experiments in agent-based modeling community.
Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler is Full Professor of Sociology of Technology and Innovation, Social Simulation at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. Her appointment at JGU started in 2013 with getting leave for obtaining the position of Director and CEO at the EA European Academy of Technology and Innovation Assessment in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany, until 2017. Before 2013, she had been Full Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at Michael Smurfit School of Business, University College Dublin, Ireland, and Director of its Innovation Research Unit IRU. Furthermore, she was Research Fellow of the Engineering Systems Division at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge/USA. She started her professional career with studying Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg, Germany. At Free University Berlin, Germany, she received her PhD for a study on Artificial Intelligence, and got her habilitation at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, for a study on simulation in Science and Technology Studies. Her main interests in research and teaching are the mutual relationship of new technologies and society, inter-organisational innovation networks, and agent-based models as methodological innovation in the Social Sciences. Petra won various research prizes, has long experience in coordinating and completing international, mostly European research projects, publishes inter-disciplinarily in international journals, and has been awarded with fellowships of various scientific societies such as the German Academy of Technical Sciences acatech or AcademiaNet, the network of excellent female scientists in Germany.
Przemysław Szufel, PhD (https://szufel.pl/en/) is an Assistant Professor in Decision Support and Analysis Division at Warsaw School of Economics. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Quantitative Methods in Economics from Warsaw School of Economics. He is a co-author of SilverDecisions software (http://silverdecisions.pl/) that enjoys over 10,000 users, participates in simulation software frameworks projects for java (https://github.com/isislab-unisa/sof) and Python (http://pycx.sourceforge.net/WPyCX.html); he is also an author of a distributed simulation computing framework for the cloud (https://github.com/pszufe/KissCluster). His current research focuses on methods for execution of large-scale simulations for numerical experiments. He specializes in in optimal design of simulation experiments and high performance computing.
His participation in ESSA MC will include support for organization process of ESSA conference and promoting tools and organizing workshops on cost-efficient execution of large scale social simulations in the cloud.
Émile Chappin is an assistant professor at TU Delft, Energy and Industry section of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management and a senior research fellow at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy and Environment. He graduated as a systems engineer and obtained his PhD “Simulating Energy Transitions” from TU Delft. He specializes in agent-based modeling with a focus on sustainability, carbon and renewables policies, energy markets, and adaptation to climate change. Émile focuses on the perspective of complex socio-technical systems and uses models and serious games to enable the support of policy interventions. Émile has been a ESSA@Work expert in various ESSA events.
The purpose of this mandate is to continue the work with the ESSA website and with the SIG Education.
Bruce Edmonds is the Director of the Centre for Policy Modelling and Professor of Social Simulation at the Manchester Metropolitan University (http://cfpm.org). He is interested in all aspects of the philosophy, methodology and application of agent-based social simulation but also in everything else. Current preoccupations include: context, how to use narrative data to inform the specification of simulations, and how models are used (or misused) in policy making processes. He co-edits the handbook on “Simulating Social Complexity” with Ruth Meyer. More about him can be found on the CfPM website.
He has seen his role in encouraging and involving newer members of the ESSA community but criticising everyone else ;-). In particular, he is supposed to encourage and help the creation of ESSA special interest groups around emergent topics of interest.
Francesca Giardini is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. After getting her PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Siena (IT), she was a postdoc at the National Research Council of Italy in Rome and at the Central European University in Budapest. She uses theoretical analysis, agent-based simulation and lab experiments in order to investigate social sustainability and to identify the contributions of different social mechanisms to cooperation.She is especially interested in the role that social simulation plays in policy design and evaluation, and in the cross-fertilization between agent-based modeling and laboratory experiments.
For her second mandate as a committee member her purpose is to improve the visibility of social simulation methods and results among social scientists.
Geeske Scholz is currently employed as visiting professor at the TU Dresden. She has a background in system science with a focus on modeling social systems. Since her PhD, she is interested in how people in group settings, especially with diverse backgrounds, learn with and from each other and develop a shared understanding of a topic at stake. She is engaged in various projects related to this question, conducting empirical and theoretical research. She is using agent-based models both for exploratory purposes and as a tool for facilitation and learning (e.g., in serious gaming). She was elected for the first time in the ESSA MC in 2016.
