I would like to thank all the colleagues who supported my election as President of ESSA. I wish they took the right decision J, what is far from obvious for a number of reasons.

First, our association has enjoyed so far an uninterrupted series of impressive leaders: to keep up to the standards they have established is no easy task for anyone. Second, the challenges that the field of agent based modelling will be facing in the next few years will pose serious tasks and problems, especially in a European perspective. Below, I will endeavour to argue this view in some detail.

As a community, agent based social simulation was born and grown up in Europe. In the US, where it has being practised for a couple of decades, it had not yet given rise to a self-conscious research field. As soon as simulating societies were perceived as an object of study in its own right, the field began to crawl throughout the scientific community all over the world. Now we can speak of a scientific tsunami: simulation and agent based models invaded new disciplines and fields of science, within and without the social sciences, as well as new domains of application. From traditional applications, like policymaking, it soon departed to the conquest of administration, resource and organization management, financial decision, etc.

Facing this worldwide progress, one might ask whether it still makes sense to speak of a European way to social simulation.  How does a regional perspective interact with the promotion of the whole field? To what extent does the preservation of local scientific communities favour the general progress of the related fields of science, and when do geographical identities interfere with the feeling to belong to the largest scientific community?

Indeed, as any other type of diversity, the preservation of scientific local communities can be expected to favour scientific competition and progress. But I think there is more to ESSA than the objective to preserve a generic European style. From their very beginning, the Simulating Societies Symposia set out a standard for social simulation, which exercised a more profound influence on agent based models than was perceived in the years to come. I am referring not only to the algorithmic, generative – to state it with Epstein’s words – approach inherent to agent based models, but also, and more specifically, to a pluralistic view of the agent base. Agents were designed at different levels of complexity, from the simplest to the most complex, depending on the research aims.

Such an unprejudiced and diversified approach to agent modelling, which characterises the SimSoc-ers’ community in Europe from its early days, is not necessarily shared by other communities. Originally proposed by sociophysicists, the spin glass models proved to be valuable competitors in quite significant social scientific domains, such as opinion dynamics. Initially seen as an option, they soon established a standard in many sub-fields and sub-communities. However, they cannot be said to be strongly representative of the European way to simulation. Let ESSA continue to give space and scientific citizenship to a view of agents’ degree of complexity as a measure exclusively determined by scientific necessity. To state it with Bertrand Russell: “there is no enemy to thinking so deadly as a false simplicity” (From the Analysis of Mind, 1921, available online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/analmd10.txt ).

Nonetheless, ESSA has a lot to learn from other communities and fields. One gets easily impressed by the growth of adjacent fields, e.g. MAS, which arose at the intersection between computational and social sciences. Born in Europe more or less in the same years (early nineties) as social simulation, MAS soon got to the other side of the ocean, keeping no track of its European origin. Now the MAS conference counts around 800 delegates. The ratio between it and any social simulation conference approximates by defect 8 to 1. Comparison is unfair, one might say: engineers, as most MAS people are, get much larger grants than any social scientist can dream of. Their “fire power”, in terms of funds and projects and therefore collaborations, is by far larger than what any social scientist can ever dare to aim at.

One should also add that the previous comparison is not necessarily to the detriment of the social simulation community. No matter how prestigious and selective the MAS conferences are, their scientific impact has been questioned from within the community itself (Coelho, and Coelho, 2005). Still, figures are impressive. Perhaps, beside what it can learn from us, there is also something this community can teach us. The interaction between these two communities should become more stable and bidirectional.

Analogous considerations hold with regard to the interaction between ESSA and other communities and scientific associations. In general, ESSA would greatly benefit from new, refreshing contributions coming from social scientific disciplines that so far showed poor or no interest for social simulation, though being concerned with problems traditionally addressed within our field. To cite some examples besides MAS, legal studies and normative reasoning are poorly represented in ESSA conferences – whereas they start to appear in similar events on the other side of the ocean (see the Agent Conference in Chicago) – although the study of norms and conventions, their evolution, recognition, and interpretation is one of the more active fields of the European community of SimSoc-ers since long (for evidence on this point, see Meyer et al., 2008). aThe same is true for ethology, primatology, and other evolutionary sciences, whilst archaeology and history are less represented than they might. Attempts to establish new interdisciplinary relationships or intensify existing ones that have been undertaken by the previous administrations proved constantly fruitful. They can only be reapplied, with patience and confidence.

Finally, our field deserves adequate attention on the part of funding agencies, especially from the European Union. Not underestimating the number and quality of simulation projects so far funded within past and present European frameworks, one might wonder whether times are mature for launching a simulation initiative, and if so, under which programme. Certainly an issue that needs being discussed within our association, and not only within the new and vital management committee that will soon become executive, but within the larger ESSA membership in any existing forum: General Conference, Special Interest Groups or Newsletter. With the hope that our association will increasingly be perceived as an opportunity for debate and intellectual growth, I wish all members good work and a long, creative scientific life.

Rosaria Conte

Russell, B. The Analysis of Mind, 1921, available online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/analmd10.txt

Coelho, F., Coelho, H. Meta-agency and individual-power: an experimental approach Intelligent Agent Technology, IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference, 19-22 Sept. 2005 Page(s): 414 – 420.

Meyer, M., Lorscheid, I., and Troitzsch, K. G. Intellectual Structure of Social Simulation as Reflected in the First Ten Years of JASSS – A Citation and Co-Citation Analysis. In Proceedings of ESSA 2008, 1-5 September 2008, Brescia, Italy.