Re: [Swarmfest2006] Keynote speaker(s) for SwarmFest 2006

[lra]

Greg Madey wrote:
> SwarmFest 2006 Organizing Committee,

Hi everyone:

I have been very negligent on SwarmFest, due to a spate of travel and
visitors that is finally over. Thanks Greg, for trying to keep things
moving.

> Two individuals have been asked with no answer back yet: Joshua  Epstein
> (Brookings) and Steve Borgatti (author of UCINET and Chairman  of the
> Org Studies Department at Boston College). If these fall  through, then
> others will be asked.
>
> Is SwarmFest interested in a joint keynote and/or luncheon (with
> speaker?) on Friday?

I think that is a good idea, to encourage interaction and reduce the
overall organization work.

> Are there any suggestions for other keynote speakers? Perhaps a
> SwarmFest only keynote speaker on Saturday? Or another joint keynote
> speaker on Friday?

Please provide feedback on these ideas!

We discussed Leigh Tesfatsion, who is certainly enthusiastic and full of
ideas. She told me that she recently completed an electric power market
model analysis that sounded pretty interesting, and she just edited a
major new handbook on agent-based computational economics.

Leigh reminded me of Elinor Ostrom at Indiana, who I keep hearing people
talk about as if she is in the middle of a lot of stuff. Her CV
(http://www.indiana.edu/~iupolsci/bio_ostrom.html) is very interesting and
impressive but doesn't indicate much on agent-based modeling.

The new SFI Bulletin has an article on stock market modeling, mostly about
Doyne Farmer, Blake LeBaron, and the old Swarm ASM model.

Marcus: What do you think about trying to get Doyne as a speaker?

It would be nice to get somebody in biology or ecology. Volker Grimm was
very honored by your suggestion to invite him, Greg, but his schedule will
not allow it. We could invite Gary An to give an update on ABM in medicine
and systems biology. I also just heard about a young professor at Virginia
who did some cool CA modeling of vascular networks:
http://bme.virginia.edu/people/faculty/peirce/

----------------

I also need to explain Valerie Permanov's email: Dr. Permanov is a
scientist at some institute in Moscow that doesn't seem very well off. He
has done some agent-based modeling of disease spread. I haven't met him
but he has worked with some of my German friends. He had to apply for a
travel grant to attend SwarmFest and to support the application I wrote a
letter inviting him as a "featured" speaker. I made it clear that we could
not promise any financial support, but Greg if any of your little pots of
money could help him out with housing cost, etc., I know he would
appreciate it. I don't know if his travel grant was approved.

Steve R.
-- 
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