Vespucci Summer Institute 2010 Programme

14 to 18 June 2010:
"Interfacing social and environmental modeling"

Facilitators: Gilberto Camara, Henk Scholten, Eduardo Dias, Max Craglia

Please find this years programme at a glance here.

The week will be organized around two perspectives:

1. Development of nature-society models using cellular automata and agents
2. Using and sharing environmental and social models in crisis response

Perspective 1 will discuss the challenges of modelling the interactions between the social and the natural systems. Modelling human-environment interactions involves collecting data, building up a conceptual approach, implementing, calibrating, validating, and repeating one or more steps again. Nature-society models need to combine different methods, including support for both cellular automata and agent-based models. To match these requirements, we will present TerraME, an open source software that supports multiparadigm modelling of nature-society interactions. The lectures will introduce TerraME, and show how to develop models using the software. Attendees to Vespucci Summer School will get essential knowledge on TerraME, and learn how they can further use this software for their research.

Perspective 2 will be addressed with a mix of talks and hands-on work, based on leading edge industry developments using mobile technologies to interface environmental and social models. Social and environmental models play a crucial role in crisis response, helping emergency workers make decisions. Examples include: flood or gas dispersion simulation and dynamic population modelling. However, such models are usually time and resource consuming both in input parameters (e.g. field measurement) and calculation time. Time is essential in crisis response and decision makers have to trade uncertainties in results against costs for resources and time (analogous to economic models). In addition, the information derived from the models must be shared, so that everyone can access the right information at the right time (net-centric approach) and that the same impression of the disaster is shared by all (map-based common operational picture). The participants will be triggered to explore and experiment where and how the use of (geo)models in crisis management leads to greater awareness of the situation, learning about their shortcomings and constraints.

Please find this years programme at a glance here.