Simulation in the Social Sciences


The course, MNGT0783 Simulation in the Social Sciences, is an elective course in the PhD programme at the Australian School of Business.

In Session 2, 2010, the course will run between 2pm and 5pm in the Pioneer International Lecture Theatre in the AGSM Building at UNSW Kensington, on Friday afternoons. The first class will not be until August 13th.

Comments from some of the 2007 participants: Here.

Simulation of social interactions focuses on the complex adaptive behavior that emerges in social systems. To better understand the behavior of such complex adaptive social systems, "artificial worlds" composed of interacting adaptive agents can be created and analyzed. Such models often exhibit properties that are strikingly similar to the actual social world, e.g., cooperation, social norms, and social stratification into different classes, and provide a unique window into understanding such phenomena. Using simulation methods, previously inaccessible, yet fundamental, questions are now becoming amenable to analysis. There is much research to be done in this area---along with creating and understanding these types of complex systems, efforts need to be directed toward developing accessible versions of these models for the classroom.

The Fourth Herbert Simon Lecture Series presented by Bob in Taiwan in October 2005 Here.

The New England Complex Systems Institute course Complex Physical, Biological and Social Systems, delivered by Prof. Yaneer Bar-Yam, President, NECSI, December 5-9, 2005, at the AGSM Here.

The course: Complex Systems: Beyond the Metaphor was offered in February 2007, organised by the School of Mathematics, UNSW, at the AGSM and co-sponsored by COSNet (the ARC Complex Open Systems Research Network), MASCOS (the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems), and AMSI (the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute). Here. Bob presented three 90-minute lectures.

Note: Dan MacKinlay has created a group for the class on web-based citation manager citeulike, which includes almost everything peer-reviewed on the course outline, plus whatever else he could work out the metadata for, at: Simulation in the Social Sciences at CiteULike.
The primary benefit of that service is that it allows easy export of the entire group's citation list in BibTeX or Endnote format and and half-dozen other formats besides, which will probably be handy for any in-class students. Additionally, it has tag-based indexing, so he has sorted the readings into which class they were part of. The readings for class 1, for example, are at http://www.citeulike.org/group/13931/tag/class_1, and a list of all tags is here. There are links to original journal abstract pages and additional PDF downloads too. Finally, it's an open collaborative list, so all and sundry may make metadata corrections and so forth. (There are still a few missing links.) -- Thanks, Dan.

Classes