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I am interested in
Computational Social Science. My specialty is the simulation of interpretive social science. I do sociological simulations of coevolving artificially intelligent
agents. The agents may have neural or genetic inductive
mechanisms. They display and read signs to figure each other out, and in doing
so they create a symbol system and societal structures. This reading and display
of signs is based on the sociological theory of symbolic interactionism. I call
this methodology "Symbolic Interactionist Modeling" I like to explore
the principle of self-organization and of life as it lies in the
dynamics of symbols.
I have a doctorate
from the Computational Sciences and
Informatics program at
George Mason University, with a major in
Computational Social Science. My advisor was Dr. John Grefenstette,a leader in the
field of Genetic Algorithms. My 1991
Master's
thesis is the one of the first (or the first?)
intelligent agent-based social science simulations. (if you know of an earlier one, please tell me!) Written before Holland's Echo, it was the first social simulation that I know of to use tags, but unlike Echo and its sucessors, it preserves autonomy. It is a socio-economic simulation of
employers and employees, each with a neural network, from which emerges status
symbols, racism, social classes, and prejudice. It was published in Behavioral Science, in 1995. My
1995 class project Please see my
CV (doc) to learn more
about my background and publications (pdf) (ps).
Last modified
December, 2007 |
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