Save the Date: Swarmfest 2011 in Santa Fe, New Mexico June 26-28, 2010 at the Santa Fe Complex (http://sfcomplex.org/).
Swamfest is the annual meeting of the Swarm Development Group (SDG), and one of the oldest communities involved in the development and propagation of agent-based modeling. Swarmfest has traditionally involved a mix of both tool-users and tool-developers, drawn from many domains of expertise. These have included, in the past, computer scientists, software engineers, biomedical researchers, ecologists, economists, political scientists, social scientists, resource management specialists and evolutionary biologists. Swarmfest represents a low-key environment for researchers to explore new ideas and approaches, and benefit from a multi-disciplinary environment.
This year we will continue to examine the range of systems being modeled with ABM, with the possibility of providing some guidance as to the suitability of the various types of agent-based models for particular types of modeling goals. We also encourage the sharing of our experiences with attempting to gain acceptance of ABM within our own research communities, and discuss strategies where cross-domain examples/analogies can aid in that process. In addition, we will continue our relationship with the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge (http://www.challenge.nm.org/) and provide a venue for those teams engaged in agent-based modeling to present their work; we have found our prior exposure to the "ABM-ers of the Future" to be very rewarding and stimulating! We will also try to identify future avenues for ABM research, including the "next" generation of ABM tools, platforms and application.
The Santa Fe Complex (http://sfcomplex.org/) is a "collaborative workspace that fosters applied complexity through interdisciplinary eduction, outreach, and development of innovative technologies to adress real-work problems, enable social cooperation, and create economic opportunities (from the Complex's Mission Statement: http://sfcomplex.org/about ) The Santa Fe Complex has hosted the previous two Swarmfests, and provides an ideal space for the collegial and interactive nature of Swarmfest.
Hope to see you in June!
Sincerely,
Gary An