Congress on Agent Computing

**International Congress on Agent Computing
**
Robert Axtell and Joshua Epstein invite you to an International Congress marking the 20th anniversary of their book, Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up. The Congress will celebrate the explosive growth of agent modeling over the last two decades; it will offer a tour d’horizon of its current state and myriad applications across the social and natural sciences, government, and industry; and finally, and it will identify challenges and opportunities—Hilbert Problems, if you will—to shape the future of agent-based computational modeling.

DATES AND LOCATION
29-30 November 2016
Research Hall, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia USA

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize 2005
W. Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute
Stuart Kauffman, MacArthur Fellow
Michael Batty, CBE, FBA, FRS, University College London

Agent-based computing is a set of ideas and technologies in wide use today for modeling social processes, across a large number of fields, from anthropology to zoology, with thousands of papers utilizing the approach being published annually at present. Agent computing is a distinct and powerful way to build models with heterogeneous agents, grounded in behavioral science, who interact directly with one another through social networks and/or spatially, to generate far from equilibrium, social dynamics and macroscopic social regularities of fundamental interest. Such models are also critical as laboratories for the exploration and discovery of alternative public policies. The approach offers a low mathematical entry bar but an unlimited scientific ceiling to students and to educators at all levels. 
We invite submission of original research in any social science field—archaeology, business, criminology, demography, economics, finance, geography, history, informatics, linguistics, management, marketing, operations research, politics, public policy, sociology—or closely allied areas such as artificial life, cognitive science, conflict resolution, Earth systems science, energy and environmental systems, epidemiology, healthcare, information systems, infrastructure, medicine, military operations, multi-agent systems computer science, network science, public health, social media, transportation, urban systems, and beyond. 

We also invite submission of Hilbert problems for agent-based modeling, important open and outstanding foundational or applied questions or challenges that currently limit the broad application or widespread adoption of agent computing (e.g., efficient parallel execution). There will also be a poster session. Graduate students are encouraged to submit their work. We anticipate some travel scholarships for graduate students. Please submit your work by 1 September to Karen Underwood ([email protected]). For more information please visit http://agentcongress.gmu.edu.

ORGANIZERS
Robert Axtell, George Mason University and Joshua Epstein, Johns Hopkins University

SPONSORS
George Mason University:
Center for Social Complexity, Mercatus Center, and Computational Public Policy Lab, College of Science, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, and Schar School of Policy and Government
Johns Hopkins University
MITRE Corporation