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Presidential
Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers >>
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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 >>
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I was appointed as a Faculty Associate of the Maryland Population Research Center (February 9, 2013)
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I have been appointed to the faculty of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) (February 6, 2013)
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I received a new grant, from the National
Institutes for Health and the RAND Corporation, in cooperation with
Michael Rendall in the University
of Maryland Population Research Center, to do geocoding and
analysis for the Displaced New Orleans Resident Study
(December 21, 2012)
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A new paper, the first on my new polyspatial
agents framework, is out in Regional Science Policy
& Practice: Torrens, P.M. & Nara,
A. (2012) “Polyspatial agents for multi-scale urban simulation and
regional policy analysis”. Regional Science Policy and
Practice, 4(4) 419-445 (DOI:
10.1111/j.1757-7802.2012.01084.x)(December 21, 2012)
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A new paper, on high-performance
computing for handling emergence in urban simulation is now
out in the International Journal of Geographic Information
Science: Zou, Y.; Torrens, P.M.; Ghanem, R.;
Kevrekidis, I. (2012) “Accelerating agent-based computation of complex
urban systems”. International Journal of Geographic
Information Science (DOI:
10.1080/13658816.2012.669891). This work was supported by a NSF EAGER
grant from the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems (December 20,
2012)
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I gave an
invited talk on agent-based modeling and computing for behavioral
geography at the Krasnow
Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University, in
Fairfax, VA today (October 22, 2012)
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| My Annals of
the Association of American Geographers paper, co-authored with Aaron
McDaniel, on modeling geographies of human behavior in riotous crowds
is now out: Torrens, P.M. & McDaniel (2013), “Modeling
geographic behavior in riotous crowds”. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 103(1): 20-46 (DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2012.685047)
(October 1, 2012)
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| I gave the
keyonte address at this year's conference for the Computational
Social Science Society of the Americas, in Santa Fe, NM
(September 19, 2012)
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I was a
distinguished speaker at the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services in Washington, D.C., where I gave a talk on modeling
geographies of behavior in critical scenarios (September 6,
2012)
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New paper: Torrens, P.M. & Nara, A.
(2012) “Polyspatial agents for multi-scale urban simulation and
regional policy analysis”. Regional Science Policy and
Practice (in press) (July 13, 2012)
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New book
chapter: Torrens, P.M. (2012) “Building mega-models for
megacities”. In Complexity
and Planning: Systems, Assemblages and Simulations,
De Roo, Gert; Hiller, Jean; and Van Wezemael, Joris (Eds.). Farnham:
Ashgate, pp. 409-427 (July 5, 2012)
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The National Science Foundation featured my work
on crowd modeling in a
Research Highlights: "Crowd
control based on individuals". This is the fourth time that
the project has made into their highlights (also "Exploring
crowd behavior in large cities"; "Subtle
movements in crowds lead to large-scale phenomena"; and "Beginning
scientists receive presidential awards") (June 7, 2012)
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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]
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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Torrens, P.M. & Griffin, W.A. (2013)
“Exploring the micro-social geography of children’sinteractions in
preschool: a long-term observational study and analysis using
Geographic Information Technologies”. Environment and Behavior (DOI:
10.1177/0013916512438885)
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Torrens, P.M. & McDaniel, A. (2013)
“Modeling geographic behavior in riotous crowds”. Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 103(1): 20-46 (DOI:
10.1080/00045608.2012.685047)
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Torrens, P.M. & Nara, A. (2012)
“Polyspatial agents for multi-scale urban simulation and regional
policy analysis”. Regional Science Policy and Practice, 4(4) 419-445
(DOI: 10.1111/j.1757-7802.2012.01084.x)
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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, 26(10): 1917-1937 (DOI:
10.1080/13658816.2012.669891)
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Torrens, P.M.
(2012) “Building mega-models for megacities”. In Complexity
and Planning: Systems, Assemblages and Simulations,
De Roo, Gert; Hiller, Jean; and Van Wezemael, Joris (Eds.). Farnham:
Ashgate, pp. 409-427
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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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