Re: [Swarmfest2006] NAACSOS speakers

[Greg Madey]

Steve,

NAACSOS has two invited speakers: Steven Bankes (CTO for Evolving  
Logic, Inc and Professor at the Rand Graduate School) and Les Gasser  
(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

I propose that Les Gasser be a speaker for NAACSOS on Thursday and  
Steven Bankes be a speaker on Friday for the shared conference day  
between both NAACSOS and SwarmFest.

Steve Bankes' abstract is below.

My understanding is that Gary An will speak on Friday also? Perhaps  
the remaining SwarmFest invited speakers can be scheduled on Saturday?

Greg

===============================

Anticipatory Modeling: Robust Inference in Computational Social Science
Steve Bankes
Evolving Logic/RAND


The world faces profound social, economic, environmental, and  
technological transitions.  How we choose to meet our challenges –  
stemming global terror, halting the spread of AIDS and other  
infectious diseases, achieving sustainable development, managing new  
genetic technologies, etc. -- will resonate throughout the 21st  
century.  Models of social-political behavior can be informative in  
understanding these problems, and can be used to anticipate possible  
future developments and the possible implications of contemplated  
actions.  Their value can be greatly enhanced by the use of robust  
inference in the design and analysis of computational experiments  
using them.  Techniques have proven their utility including the use  
of co-evolutionary mechanisms to seek in parallel robust conclusions  
and cases that maximally stress them, and the use of machine learning  
techniques to infer human interpretable generalizations from the  
results of thousands or millions of experiments.  These methods  
harness computation not to solve the intractable problem of  
predicting the long-term future, but instead to enable a  
fundamentally different, more sensible question:  Given what we know  
today, how should we act to best shape the future to our liking?  Our  
greatest potential influence for shaping the future may often be  
precisely over those time scales where our gaze is most dim.




On May 18, 2006, at 4:39 PM, Steve Railsback wrote:

> Mike- have you guys figured out when the NAACSOS invited speakers  
> are going to be?
>
> Steve
>
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