Professor, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Professor, School of Complex Adaptive Systems
Affiliate Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration
Arizona State University
My interests center around long-term human ecology and landscape dynamics with ongoing projects in the Mediterranean (late Pleistocene through mid-Holocene) and recent work in the American Southwest (Holocene-Archaic). I’ve done fieldwork in Spain, Bosnia, and various locales in North America and have expertise in hunter/gatherer and early farming societies, geoarchaeology, lithic technology, and evolutionary theory, with an emphasis on human/environmental interaction, landscape dynamics, and techno-economic change.
Quantitative methods are critical to archaeological research, and socioecological sciences in general. They are an important focus of my research, especially emphasizing dynamic modeling, spatial technologies (including GIS and remote sensing), statistical analysis, and visualization. I am a member of the open source GRASS GIS international development team that is making cutting edge spatial technologies available to researchers and students around the world.
The big picture question driving my research is how do complex systems of interactions among individuals / agents result in emergent properties and how do those emergent properties feedback to affect individual / agent decisions. I have explored this big picture question in a number of different contexts including the evolution of cooperation, suburban sprawl, traffic patterns, financial systems, land-use and land-change in urban systems, and most recently social media. For all of these explorations, I employ the tools of complex systems, most importantly agent-based modeling.
My current research focus is on understanding the dynamics of social media, examining how concepts like information, authority, influence and trust diffuse in these new media formats. This allows us to ask questions such as who do users trust to provide them with the information that they want? Which entities have the greatest influence on social media users? How do fads and fashions arise in social media? What happens when time is critical to the diffusion process such as an in a natural disaster? I have employed agent-based modeling, machine learning, geographic information systems, and network analysis to understand and start to answer these questions.
My research interests include policy informatics and decision making, modeling in policy analysis and management decisions, public health management and policy, and the role of public value in policy development. I am particularly interested in less mainstream approaches to modeling that account for learning, feedback, and other systems dynamics. I include Bayesian inference, agent-based models, and behavioral assumptions in both my research and teaching.
In my dissertation research, I conceptualize state Medicaid programs as complex adaptive systems characterized by diverse actors, behaviors, relationships, and objectives. These systems reproduce themselves through both strategic and emergent mechanisms of program management. I focus on the mechanism by which citizens are sorted into or out of the system: program enrollment. Using Bayesian regression and agent-based models, I explore the role of administrative practices (such as presumptive eligibility and longer continuous eligibility periods) in increasing enrollment of eligible citizens into Medicaid programs.
Associate Professor
School of Management Science and Engineering, Shandong Technology and Business University (Yantai 264005, P. R. China)
Ph. D. Degree, 09/2009 – 07/2015
School of Economics and Management, Beihang University (P. R. China)
M. A. Degree, 09/2003 – 02/2006
The Institute of Systems Engineering, Dalian University of Technology (P. R. China)
B. A. Degree, 09/1999 – 07/2003
Department of Information and Control Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (P. R. China)
Visiting Scholar at GECS – Research Group of Experimental and Computational Sociology (March, 2017 – February, 2018)
Università degli Studi di Brescia (Italy)
Co-supervisor: Professor Flaminio Squazzoni
Summer school in ‘Agent-based modeling for social scientists’ (September 4-8, 2017)
University of Brescia, Italy
Instructors: Flaminio Squazzoni, Simone Gabbriellini, Nicolas Payette, Federico Bianchi
The Santa Fe Institute’s Massive Open Online Course: Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling (Jun 5 – September 8, 2017)
The Santa Fe Institute, Complexity Explore Web: abm.complexityexploer.org
Instructors: Bill Rand
Summer school in ‘Complex systems and management’ (July 2-12, 2012)
National Defense University, P. R. China
Instructors: Xinjun Mao, Yongfang Liu, Dinghua Shi, Qiyue Cheng
Routine dynamics, Agent-based modeling, Computational social/organization science, Industrial systems engineering, etc.
Ms. Stringfellow is a PhD candidate whose goal is to identify ways to build and leverage the natural support systems of people who are experiencing problems related to their illicit drug use. Her current interest is in how these support systems operate in small towns with limited formal resources for quitting. To that end, she recently began conducting in-depth qualitative interviews for her dissertation in a semi-rural county in eastern Missouri. These interviews will be used to build an agent-based model, a type of dynamic simulation modeling that can be used to represent heterogeneous actors with multiple goals and perceptions. As a research assistant and dissertation fellow with the Social System Design Lab, she has also been trained in system dynamics, an aggregate-level dynamic simulation modeling method.
Prior to joining the PhD program, she worked as a research associate at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program from 2008-2012. BHCHP is an exemplar model of providing patient-centered care for people who have experienced homelessness. There, she gained significant experience in managing research projects, collecting qualitative and quantitative data, and program evaluation. She earned her MSW from the University of Michigan in 2007, with a focus on policy and evaluation in community and social systems, and a BA in sociology in 2005, also at the University of Michigan. Ms. Stringfellow was born and raised in a small town in Michigan.
Eric has graduate degrees in urban planning and policy and sociology and an undergraduate degree in biology. He has worked on multiple collaborative and interdisciplinary projects and is skilled at engaging communities and other stakeholders. He is adept at qualitative research and has earned a Certificate in Geospatial Analysis and Visualization, demonstrating proficiency in Adobe Suite, ArcGIS, agent-based modeling and system dynamics modeling. He is currently writing manuscripts for publication based on his work on motivating energy retrofit decisions, energy-related urban planning, municipal decision-making on infrastructure investments, and other work on resilience and sustainability.
Conducts urban planning and policy research on energy efficiency, environmental, and infrastructure decision making.
Prof. Christian E. Vincenot is by nature an interdisciplinary researcher with broad scientific interests. He majored in Computer Science / Embedded Systems (i.e. IoT) at the Université Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, France) while working professionally in the field of Computer Networking and Security. He then switched the focus of his work towards Computational Modelling, writing his doctoral dissertation on Hybrid Modelling in Ecology, and was awarded a PhD in Social Informatics by Kyoto University in 2011 under a scholarship by the Japanese Ministry of Research. He subsequently started a parallel line of research in Conservation Biology (esp. human-bat conflicts) under a postdoctoral fellowship of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (2012-2014). This led him to create the Island Bat Research Group (www.batresearch.net), which he is still coordinating to this date. In 2014, he was appointed as the tenured Assistant Professor of the Biosphere Informatics Laboratory at Kyoto University. He also been occupying editorial roles for the journals PLOS ONE, Frontiers in Environmental Science, and Biology. In 2020, he created Ariana Technologies (www.ariana-tech.com), a start-up operating in the field of Data Science/Simulation and IoT for crisis management.
Prof. Vincenot’s main research interests lie in the theoretical development of Hybrid Mechanistic Simulation approaches based on Individual/Agent-Based Modeling and System Dynamics, and in their applications to a broad range of systems, with particular focus on Ecology.