Day of the Social Simulation Tutorial

This is Andy Turner's third in a series of GridCast posts about ISGC 2010. His previous post is here.

Yesterday (2010-03-07) I helped to run and participated in the Social Simulation Tutorial. All the documentation is on a wiki and can be accessed via the following URL:
* https://e-research.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/site/bin/view/SocialSimulation/

The tutorial was organised by Alex Voss who managed all the practical aspects and developed all the tutorial instructions for developing and running social simulation models with Repast on local, Grid and Cloud computing resources. Alex introduced social simulation and agent based modelling and ran through what the tutorial involved and what we hoped tutees would manage to get done in a practical sense. I delivered a presentation before lunch on the development of individual Level population data for and using social simulation models. In the afternoon, Rob Procter gave a presentation about e-Infrastructure for supporting social simulation. This was largely based on what we are working on in the NeISS project.

Preparing the tutorial was a considerable amount of work, but I think it was worth it. Some tutees managed to run through nearly all the tutorial. I'm not sure how many attempted to modify the social simulation model and run that, but anyway, in terms of the practical being followed, it was a success. I was pleased with the level of engagement and was excited to here about work done on social simulation by colleagues from Academia Sinica that I met last year as we set off on this track.

I had hoped to submit this post last night, but other work got in the way and I went into town for a lovely meal of dumplings and a wonder through the lantern festival.

Today I am enjoying the iRODS Workshop. More on this in another GridCast post later and on this blog about my work at ISGC 2010.