Frontiers of Computational Social Science: From Neurons to Nations

C4 presents the John von Neumann Public Lectures in Complexity & Computation  

The April 2015 speaker is Josh Epstein, Johns Hopkins University  

Frontiers of Computational Social Science: From Neurons to Nations  

Wednesday, April 8, 2015, 7PM

H.F. DeLuca Forum

Discovery Building

330 N. Orchard St.

Dr. Joshua Epstein is a pioneer of Agent_Based Modeling, in which artificial societies of software people interact on simulated landscapes to generate realistic social dynamics, from revolutions to epidemics to the reconstruction of ancient civilizations. As immersive movies, he will show a fascinating array of agent-based models, ranging from a "toy" school playground up to the deadly serious 7 billion agent Global Epidemic Model, used during Ebola and earlier pandemics. He will discuss his plans to populate these models with Agent_Zero, his next-generation software person-grounded in contemporary neuroscience and endowed with emotions like fear. Epstein's vision of large-scale spatial models populated by neuro-cognitive agents represents the frontier of computational social science.

Speaker Bio

Joshua M. Epstein, Ph.D., is Professor of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He is the director of the JHU Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences, and co-director of the JHU Systems Institute, based in the Whiting School of Engineering.  He holds Joint Appointments in the departments of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Civil Engineering, Economics, Environmental Health Sciences, Biostatistics, and International Health, as well as a core faculty appointment in the JHU Institute for Computational Medicine. He is an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.  A member of the New York Academy of Sciences, Epstein recently served on the Institute of Medicine's Committee for Identifying and Prioritizing New Preventive Vaccines. Previously, Epstein was Senior Fellow in Economic Studies and Director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics at the Brookings Institution. A pioneer in agent-based computational modeling of social dynamics, Epstein has authored seven books, including Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, with Robert Axtell (MIT Press, 1996); Nonlinear Dynamics, Mathematical Biology, and Social Science (Addison-Wesley, 1997); Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling (Princeton University Press, 2006); and most recently Agent_Zero: Toward Neurocognitive Foundations for Generative Social Science (Princeton University Press, 2013). Epstein holds a B.A. from Amherst College and a Ph.D. from MIT. He has taught at Princeton and Johns Hopkins, and has lectured worldwide. In 2008, he received an NIH Director's Pioneer Award, and in 2010, an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Amherst College.