TUESDAY May 14

Agent-based modelling for agricultural economics

ESSA is the European Social Simulation Association. Founded more than 20 years ago, ESSA is the world’s largest society for Social Simulation. During this session, the ESSA Management Committee would like to engage the participants (both ESSA and non-ESSA members) in discussions about several topics that the social simulation community finds relevant, among others:

• how to organise common methodological learning;
• how to work more effectively with other associations around the world;
• how to become a more inclusive society;
• how to collaborate through grant proposal writing;
• how to better support social simulation education and training;
• how to provide better support to early career researchers;
• how to better facilitate access to specialized knowledge;
• how to promote social simulation in research and decision making;
• how to facilitate engagement in the community.

Depending on the number of participants, the session will be organised as plenary discussion, break-out rooms, and/or fishbowl discussion.

The scope of this session is to discuss about the empirical dimension in ABM. This will include topics such as what makes the comparison between models and data difficult, the role of abstractions and free variables, the possibility of making ABMs falsifiable, and much more. This session is organized by the newborn Social Interest Group (SIG) on Strongly Empirical Modelling.

Social simulation is acknowledged to be a critical tool for dealing with different kinds of crises impacting societies, e.g. COVID, migration, climate change. Yet, in the course of a crisis it might be necessary to adjust and revise the process of developing simulation models, running simulation experiments and communicating the results. Classic scientific methodologies, which are slow-paced, meticulous and focused on delivering academic papers that will be peer reviewed are not possible anymore.
“Modelling in times of crises” is a session organised by the Special Interest Group “Building ResilienCe with Social Simulations (BRICSS)”. This SIG aims to build up a community that will contribute to advancing scholarly knowledge on social simulation for crises and to the establishment of social simulation as a relevant and trusted tool for decision makers.
Our session will have a seminar format: in the first part the members of our community are invited to present their work (5 minutes speed talks), while the second part will consist of an open discussion to identify the needs of our community and further activities of the SIG, such as events, special issues or potential conferences tracks.

Now that different branches of computer science but also social sciences are claiming that “finally now one can study social interaction or processes” using Large Language Model based agents, is there a future for Social Simulation as we know it?