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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) |
| I have joined the Editorial Board of Lecture Notes in Mechanics (March 10, 2010) |
I will be giving a talk at the ESRI space-time modeling and analysis workshop in Redlands, CA sometime between February 22 and 23, as part of Redlands GIS Week (February 7, 2010) |
| I have joined the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Society Systems Science (January 23, 2010) | | The National Science Foundation's Division for Civil and Mechanical Systems
has awarded me a new grant for research with the University of Southern
California and Princeton University. The topic is "Accelerating
innovation in agent-based simulations: Application to complex
socio-behavioral phenomena" (January 19, 2010) |
| I have joined the Editorial Board of Geojournal (December 18, 2009) | | I have joined the Editorial Board of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (December 15, 2009) | | I have joined the International Program Committee for the International Association of Science and Technology for Development, International Conference on Environmental Modelling and Simulation, to be held in Banff, Alberta, Canada, from July 15 to 17, 2010 (December 15, 2009) | | I have joined the committee for Where 2.0 2010, to be held in San Jose, from March 31 to April 1, 2010 (November 15, 2009) |
| My research lab is involved in four talks to be presented at the NAACSOS
(North American Association for Computational Social and Organization
Sciences) meeting in Tempe this weekend. I will be talking about
"Modeling urban crowds"; I am also involved in a paper with Andrew Crooks, Andy Hudson-Smith, and Mike Batty
on "Visulaization in agent-based modeling". Xun Li is presenting our
work on "A machine learning based computational modeling framework of
human movement behavior", as well as our collaboration with William
Griffin on "An Introduction to Netlogo PlayMate Model" (October 20,
2009) |
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will be talking at the University of Minnesota's Department of Computer
Science and Department of Geography on October 26, on the topic of behavioral geography for crowd animation and computational social science (September 22, 2009) |
| A
chapter that I wrote on process models and GIS is in a new book
available from ESRI Press: Torrens, P.M. (2009) “Process models and
next-generation geographic information technology”. In GIS Best Practices: Essays on Geography and GIS. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, pp. 63-75 (September 21, 2009) |
| My chapter on "Cellular automata" for the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography is now out (September 4, 2009) |
| I was invited by the Nortwestern Institute for Complexity to give a talk at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, where I spoke about "behavioral geography for crowd animation" (September 2, 2009) |
| I have joined the editorial board for the journal, Future Internet. (August 13, 2009) |
| The first of a two-part interview that I did with the Editor-in-Chief of Directions Magazine on the future of GIS is out today. The second part will be published on Wednesday. (August 3, 2009) |
| I was interviewed by Vector 1 Magazine
about the interface of Geographic Information technologies and
geographic processing engines in facilitating a shift to "Web 3.0". The
interview is now Online: "Web 3.0 and the rise of process engines", Vector 1 Magazine: July 11, 2009, Matt Ball (July 13, 2009) |
My research on agent-based modeling was highlighted in a report by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's National Science and Technology Council (my work was highlighted on the front cover.) The report, entitled "Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences in the Federal Context"
is "a distillation of the most pressing scientific challenges in the
SBE sciences, and their policy implications for Federal agencies. It
outlines the specific tools, methodology, and infrastructure that are
changing our understanding of how these challenges in the social and
behavioral arenas may be addressed." The NTSC is tasked by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with coordinating science and technology policy. (June 27, 2009) |
| A paper that I wrote with Itzhak Benenson in 2005, introducing the idea of Geographic Automata Systems, is one of the top-20 most-cited articles in the International Journal of Geographic Information Science. (June 25, 2009) |
| I was invited by ESRI to compose an article for ArcNews. It has now been published and it featured on the front page: “Process models and next-generation geographic information technology”, ArcNews, 31(2) (summer): 1-4 (June 12, 2009) |
| Der Spiegel,
the German weekly news magazine has a feature on my behavior modeling
work in the science and technology section of the May 4 issue:
"Verhaltensforschung: Weisheit der menge (Behavior research: The wisdom
of the many)”, written by Frank Thadeusz. Der Spiegel has a circulation of > 1 million readers (May 4, 2009) |
| The National Science Foundation's new Flash-based portal, Science 360, has a feature on my crowd modeling work (March 31, 2009) |
| BBC Focus magazine,
"the world's best science and technology monthly", featured my research
on crowd behavior in their April issue (with a mention on the front page),
with a story entitled, "The trouble with crowds: The scientists working
to prevent another Hillsborough", that discusses crowd behavior and
critical events on the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough diasaster (Edward Chipperfield) (March 10, 2009) |
| LiveScience's Research in Action section has featured my work on crowd and riot modeling, with a piece entitled, "Riot dynamics modeled". Currently, the story is featured on the front page (Diane Banegas) (March 8, 2009) |
| My work (and my photograph!) is featured on the front page of Engineering News Record: "Researchers in ‘early career’ lauded for work to revolutionize engineering and industry" (Debra K. Rubin) (February 22, 2009) |
| The Association of American Geographers newsletter has a feature on my Presidential Award in this month's issue (February 16, 2009) |
| Popular Mechanics interviewed me for a feature on crowds at today's presidential inauguration: "How officials will control the crowds at obama's inauguration" (Philip Taylor) (January 20, 2009) |
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 | | | Torrens, P.M. (2010) “Verifying automata models for human-environment applications”. In Urban Remote Sensing: Monitoring, Synthesis and Modeling in the Urban Environment, Yang, Xiaojun (Ed.). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons (in press) |
| | | Torrens, P.M. (2010). "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). |  | | Torrens, P. M. (2010) “Agent-based models and the spatial sciences". Geography Compass (in press). |
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Torrens, P.M. (2009) “Process models and next-generation geographic information technology”. In GIS Best Practices: Essays on Geography and GIS. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, pp. 63-75. |
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Torrens, Paul M. (2009). “Cellular automata”, in: Kitchin, Rob and Thrift, Nigel (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, London: Elsevier, pp. 1-4. |
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Torrens, P.M. (2009). “Process models and next-generation geographic information technology”, ArcNews, 31(2) (summer): 1-4 |
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Torrens, P.M. (2008). "Modeling megacity futures". Symposium on Megacities,
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Viterbi
School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles,
November 10-11, 2008 |
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Shiode, N. & Torrens, P. M. (2008) “Comparing the growth dynamics of real and virtual cities”. In Understanding Dynamics of Geographic Domains, Hornsby, K. & Yuan, M., (Eds.). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. |
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Torrens, P.M. (2008) “A toolkit for measuring sprawl”. Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, 1(1): 5-36 (DOI: 10.1007/s12061-008-9000-x) |
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Torrens, P.M. (2008) "Wi-Fi geographies". Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98(1): 59-84 (DOI: 10.1007/s12061-008-9000-x) |
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