CSSSA - September Webinar

Dear CSSSA community,

Join us for our September webinar with Dr. Rob Axtell and the CSSSA Team for An Open Discussion on Education Needs for Agent-based Simulation .

🗓️ Date: Wednesday, September 24, 2025
🕚 Time: 10:00 AM Eastern Time
💻 Location: Zoom (link provided upon registration)

Abstract: Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) has been applied far and wide to better understand our world. Each new application domain brings with it the existing cultures of the domain’s experts, including expectations and requirements. As such, it is foolhardy to expect agent-based modeling to be standardized across all domains. This begs the question: how do we educate the next generation of agent-based modeler? Should it be domain specific or is there core knowledge that everyone should know? Who gets to decide what that knowledge is? How will the students learn such knowledge?This month’s webinar, we propose to start exploring this topic through an open forum on the application of ABMS education. Our intent is not to answer these questions but start the discussion.

Bio: Professor Axtell is the author, with Joshua Epstein, of Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (MIT Press). His research has appeared in Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as in leading field-specific journals such as The Journal of Economic Literature, The American Economic Review, The Economic Journal, and many others. His research has been reprised in newspapers (e.g., Wall St. Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post) and science magazines (e.g., Scientific American, Technology Review, Wired). For the past decade he has been using microdata on individuals to build large-scale models of the Financial Crisis of 2008-9 (with JD Farmer, Oxford, and J Geanakoplos, Yale), the dynamics of business firms (with O Guerrero, Turing Institute), and natural resource exploitation, e.g., fisheries (with UC Santa Barbara, Oxford, and the Ocean Conservancy). The research on companies is described at length in a forthcoming book, ‘Dynamics of Firms from the Bottom Up: Data, Theories, and Models’, due out next year, which uses U.S. micro-data on firm sizes, ages, growth rates, networks, and locations to create a model at 1:1 scale with the American economy.

We look forward to seeing you there,

The CSSSA Webinar Organizing Team