AIMSS
Adaptive Intelligent Model-Building for the Social Sciences
using Symbiotic Simulation

ESRC Project RES-149-25-1053

Partners

Project Summary

The increasing complexity of the policy making process calls for new support technologies. A reliable and trustworthy support system is needed to make policy decisions that affect the  lives, health and safety of large communities.  This project will investigate the application of a novel agent-based and Grid-enabled simulation technique to Public Policy decision support.

The novel aspect of the work is the absorption of new data into the states of the simulation, while the simulation is ongoing.  This approach, referred to as Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems (DDDAS), has demonstrated its advantages in the simulation of physical systems but has not yet been applied in the Social Sciences. This project will explore the feasibility of this approach in a number of scenarios in Public Policy.  It is anticipated  that DDDAS simulation techniques can enable more accurate understanding of the observed system and more reliable predictions of its future states.  The proposed approach can also lead to the discovery of new relationships in existing data. This can lead to more creative solutions to policy problems, new theories, and new ontologies for describing the underlying system.  In the longer term the project is oriented towards diagnostic interventions and resource management problems in public policy.

The project is funded as an e-Social Science Small Grant by the Economic and Social Research Council, and is coordinated by the National e-Social Science Centre  in Manchester.

NCeSS maintains a page on the AIMSS project here.

Publications

  1. Catriona Kennedy, Georgios Theodoropoulos, Volker Sorge, Edward Ferrari, Peter Lee, and Chris Skelcher, "AIMSS: An Architecture for Data Driven Simulations in the Social Sciences",  Workshop on Dynamic Data-Driven Applications Simulation at ICCS 2007, Beijing, China, UK. May 2007. Y. Shi et al. (Eds.): ICCS 2007, Part I, LNCS 4487, pp. 1098–1105, 2007. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

  2. Catriona Kennedy, Georgios Theodoropoulos, Edward Ferrari, Peter Lee, and Chris Skelcher, "Towards an Automated Approach to Dynamic Interpretation of Simulations", Asia Modelling Symposium 2007, University in conjunction with Thailand’s 11th Annual National Symposium on Computational Science and Engineering (ANSCSE-11), Prince of Songkla University, Phuket Campus,  27 -  30 March 2007.
  3. Catriona Kennedy, "Semantic Pluralism for Collaborative Model Development", Technical Report CSR-07-4, University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, April 2007.  
  4. Catriona Kennedy and Georgios Theodoropoulos,  " Adaptive Intelligent Modelling for the Social Sciences: Towards a Software Architecture", Technical Report CSR-06-11, University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, October 2006
  5. Peter Lee, Ed Ferrari, Catriona Kennedy, Georgios Theodoropoulos and Chris Skelcher,  "Assisted Model Building in the Social Sciences using Data Driven Simulation" Second International Conference in e-Social Science, Manchester, UK. June 2006.  
  6. Catriona Kennedy and Georgios Theodoropoulos,  "Intelligent Management of Data Driven Simulations to Support Model Building in the Social Sciences" Workshop on Dynamic Data-Driven Applications Simulation at ICCS 2006, Reading, UK. May 2006. V.N. Alexandrov et al. (Eds.): ICCS 2006, Part III, LNCS 3993, pp. 562--569. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006  
  7. Catriona Kennedy and Georgios Theodoropoulos,  "Towards Intelligent Data-Driven Simulation for Policy Decision Support in the Social Sciences", Technical Report CSR-05-9, University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, October 2005
     

Software

  1. AIMSS prototype simulation (Simply download the setup file and double click on it. Once installed, run the program as follows: Start->Programs->Housing Simulation->SimHouse

 

AIMSS Workshops

  1. Improving Evidence Based Policy Decisions: Piloting the Application of Advanced Computer Modelling Techniques to Real Life Policy Problems, ESRC/JISC Agenda Setting Workshop, Birmingham, 9 February 2007.

Page maintained by G. Theodoropoulos. Last update: 07/12/2007