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Swarm Fest Old Man River Women in Machine Learning
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SwarmFest

Ph.D. candidates Ryan Kennedy, computer science and engineering; Kelly Lane, biological sciences; and Gerhard Niederwieser, a visiting graduate student from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, received the Best Presentation Award for the poster, software demonstration, and talk they presented — “Modeling Disease Transmission in Long-tailed Macaques on Bali, Indonesia” — at the Tenth Annual Swarm Agent-based Simulation Meeting (SwarmFest 2006) at the University in June.

Agent-based modeling is a simulation and modeling technique with methodological roots in computational social science, artificial life, cellular automata, complex systems, self-organization emergence, and complex adaptive systems. Applications of agent-based modeling include problems in economics, ecology, social science, environmental science, urban planning, business, cognitive science, biocomplexity, and the design and engineering of complex systems.

SwarmFest is the annual agent-based modeling conference for engineers, scientists, modelers, and programmers from many fields. The 2006 meeting was hosted by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the University’s Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Biocomplexity. They also hosted SwarmFest 2003. Associate Professor Gregory R. Madey was on the organizing committee for both events. Madey and his research group are currently applying Swarm modeling techniques to problems in environmental geochemistry and a National Science Foundation study of the Open Source Software development phenomenon.