| News | New publications | New grants | Contact details |
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Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers >> |
I was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
by President Bush in a ceremony at the White House on December 19,
2008. The award was for my work on computer models of human behavior in
critical situations. Press releases: White House; Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy; National Science Foundation; Arizona State University; The Association of American Geographers; UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA); UCL Department of Geography; Engineering News Record; The Irish Times. (Photo by Chris Greenberg.)
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News >> (older news is here)
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A
couple of new papers on my movement modeling work and related computing
architectures have been published recently (May 8, 2012):
- Torrens, P.M. & McDaniel, A. (2012) "Modeling geographic behavior in riotous crowds". Annals of the Association of American Geographers (in press; DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2012.685047) [project here]
- Torrens,
P.M. & Griffin, W.A. (2012) “Exploring the micro-social geography of children’s
interactions in preschool: a long-term observational study and analysis using
Geographic Information Technologies”. Environment
and Behavior (in press; DOI: 10.1177/0013916512438885) [project here]
- Zou, Y.; Torrens, P.M.; Ghanem, R.; Kevrekidis, I. (2012) “Accelerating agent-based computation of complex urban systems”. International Journal of Geographic Information Science (in press; DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2012.669891) [project here]
- Torrens, P.M. (2012). "Moving agent-pedestrians through space and time". Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(1): 35-66 (DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2011.595658) [project here]
| The Reuters news agency filmed an interview with me about my riot and crowd modeling work. Some of the new work that I have been doing on 4D physics integraion
with the agent-based modeling pipeline also featured in the segment.
This has now been picked up by a variety of newspapers, news shows, and
magazines, including
CBS,
ABC,
the Baltimore Sun,
the Chicago Tribune, and
Scientific American.
(January 2, 2012)
| My research on riot modeling is featured in Bill Wasik's cover story for the January edition of Wired magazine in the United States: "#Riot: self-organized, hyper-networked revolts—coming to a city near you". Wired (see page 82). (December 18, 2011)
| New Scientist has a feature on my riot and crowd modeling work; currently it is on the front page of their Website: "Virtual rioters predict how crowds move". More details on the work are available here, and I have a paper on the model and application, co-authored with Aaron McDaniel, forthcoming in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers in 2012. (November 16, 2011)
| I will be giving a talk at George Mason University
in Fairfax, VA on Monday, October 24 at 12. The address is Department
of Computational Social Science, Kransnow Institute for Advanced Study,
Research I, CSC Suite, Level 3, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA
22030. The talk will be on the topic of: "Animating agent movement in
computer models: fusing theory, technology, big data, and
machine-learning". (October 21, 2011)
| New
paper accepted: Zou, Y.; Torrens, P.M.; Ghanem, R.; Kevrekidis, I.
(2012) “Accelerating agent-based computation of complex urban systems”.
International Journal of Geographic Information Science. This paper was the product of my collaboration with Roger Ghanem at the University of Southern California's Departments of Civil Engineering and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and Ioannis Kevrekidis and Yu Zou
at Princeton University's Department of Chemical and Biological
Engineering. We have been developing a meta-simulation infrastructure
for accelerating agent-based modeling, using Ioannis's equation-free
approach, Roger's methods for measuring uncertainty, and my agent-based
models. This project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation's
EAGER program; more details of the research are available here (September 21, 2011)
| I have joined the editorial board of Transactions in GIS (September 4, 2011)
| I have joined the program committee for the GIScience Conference to be held at the Ohio State University on Septmber 18 to 21, 2012 (September 4, 2011)
| My work to build a riot simulation environment with Aaron McDaniel at GeoEye, Inc. has been accepted for publication: Torrens, P.M. & McDaniel, A. (2012) "Modeling geographic behavior in riotous crowds". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Some details/demos from this project, and the new 3D/4D immersive interface to the riot model that we are building are available here (August 22, 2011)
| The German magazine, Spektrum, featured my research on modeling crowd behavior: "Kluge agenten zu fuß" (intelligent agents on foot) (August 12, 2011)
| My research on modeling crowd behavior in big cities was featured in a National Science Foundation highlight: "Exploring crowd behavior in large cities" (August 11, 2011)
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I am moving the Geosimulation Research Laboratory to the Department of Geography,
University of Maryland, College Park. Trekking from the wild west to
the nation's capitol. We should be up-and-running there mid-August
(July 26, 2011)
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New
paper accepted: Torrens, P.M., Nara, A.; Li, X.; Zhu, H.; Griffin,
W.A.; Brown, S. “An extensible simulation environment and movement
metrics for testing walking behavior in agent-based models”. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems.
This paper describes some of the nbuts-and-bolts of the new agent-based
system I have been building to simulate movement. It focuses, in
particular, on methods for cross-validating model runs and for
verifying simulated scenarios against traces of real-world movement
captured from various location-enabled media/devices. Some of the validation work is described here (July 14, 2011)
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I have added a page describing (briefly) my work on developing a new polyspatial model of pedestrian movement,
which I have built as a fully immersive and animated simulation
environment. More details about the model are forthcoming some time in
the near future in a paper for the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. In the meantime, I have provided some graphics and a sample demonstration (June 22, 2011)
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| I have been invited by Suzana Dragićević and Bin Jiang to give the keynote address at the upcoming ICA Workshop on Geospatial Analysis and Modeling, August 10-12 in Burnaby, BC. I will be talking about "moving agents in geosimulation" [abstract, project Webpage] (June 21, 2011)
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I have added some (brief) details about my project to build a riot model. There is also a demo of a new prototype animation/immersive interface to the model (June 17, 2011)
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New paper in Transactions in GIS, which details my work with Haojie Zhu and William Griffin on machine-learning geographic behavior for agent-based models, using hybrids of observation data and output of other, generic, agent models [Torrens, P.M., Li, X., Griffin, W.A. (2011). “Building agent-based walking models by machine-learning on diverse databases of space-time trajectory samples”. Transactions in Geographic Information Science, 15(s1): 67-94]. You can look at the demo here (June 12, 2011)
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NSF highlighted my work on behavioral modeling in critical situations in a report to the House of Representatives (see page 6) on
the value of the SBE Directorate's program to the American taxpayer.
(This follows a highlight by the U.S. Office of Science and Technology
Policy on my research this time last year, where my work featured on
the front page.) The 2011 report was a response to criticism (pdf) of the Directorate's mission (June 6, 2011)
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My research on developing models of pedestrian behavior got a mention in a recent article in Discover Magazine, entitled, "Visual virtual people: a better model for the behavior of crowds" (May 7, 2011)
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My paper on machine-learning movement from partial trajectory samples, which I wrote with Xun Li and William Griffin has been accepted in the special session on space-time GIS to be held at the ESRI User Conference in San Diego, July 11-15, 2011 (April 21, 2011)
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I have joined the Program Committee for the 4th World Congress on Social Simulation, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, September 4-7, 2012 (April 21, 2011)
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New paper accepted: Torrens,
P.M., Li, X., Griffin, W.A. (2011). “Building agent-based walking
models by machine-learning on diverse databases of space-time
trajectory samples”. Transactions in Geographic Information Science (in press). (March 8, 2011)
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| | Torrens, P.M. & McDaniel, A. (2012) "Modeling geographic behavior in riotous crowds". Annals of the Association of American Geographers (in press; DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2012.685047)
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| | Torrens,
P.M. & Griffin, W.A. (2012) “Exploring the micro-social geography of children’s
interactions in preschool: a long-term observational study and analysis using
Geographic Information Technologies”. Environment
and Behavior (in press; DOI: 10.1177/0013916512438885)
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| | Zou, Y.; Torrens, P.M.; Ghanem, R.; Kevrekidis, I. (2012) “Accelerating agent-based computation of complex urban systems”. International Journal of Geographic Information Science (in press; DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2012.669891)
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| | Torrens, P.M. (2012) “Building mega-models for megacities”. In Complexity and the Planning of the Built Environment, De Roo, Gert; Hiller, Jean; and Van Wezemael, Joris (Eds.). Farnham: Ashgate (in press)
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| Torrens, P.M. (2012). "Moving agent-pedestrians through space and time". Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(1): 35-66 (DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2011.595658)
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Torrens, P.M., Nara, A.; Li, X.; Zhu, H.; Griffin, W.A.; Brown, S.
(2012) “An extensible simulation environment and movement metrics for
testing walking behavior in agent-based models”. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 36(1):
1-17 (DOI: 10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2011.07.005)
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Torrens, P.M. (2012) “Urban geosimulation”. In Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems: Moving from Theory to Real World Applications, Heppenstall, A.; Crooks, A.; See, L.; Batty, M. (Eds.). Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp.
435-451 (DOI:
10.1007/978-90-481-8927-4_20)
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Torrens, P.M., Li, X., Griffin, W.A. (2011). “Building agent-based walking models by machine-learning on diverse databases of space-time trajectory samples”. Transactions in Geographic Information Science, 15(s1): 67-94 [movie demo link]
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Torrens, P.M. (2010). “Agent-based modeling and the spatial sciences”. Geography Compass, 4(5): 428-448 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00311.x)
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Torrens, P.M. (2010). "Geography and computational social science".GeoJournal, 75(2): 133-148 (DOI: 10.1007/s10708-010-9361-y)
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