Gerald Schaefer

Gerald Schaefer gained his BSc. in Computing from the University of Derby and his PhD in Computer Vision from the University of East Anglia. He worked at the Colour & Imaging Institute, University of Derby (1997-1999), in the School of Information Systems, University of East Anglia (2000-2001), in the School of Computing and Informatics at Nottingham Trent University (2001-2006), and in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Aston University (2006-2009) before joining the Department of Computer Science at Loughborough University where he leads the Vision, Imaging and Autonomous Systems Research Division.

His research interests are mainly in the areas of colour image analysis, image retrieval, physics-based vision, medical imaging, and computational intelligence. He has published extensively in these areas with a total publication count exceeding 250. He is a member of the editorial board of more than 10 international journals, reviews for over 70 journals and served on the programme committee of more than 200 conferences. He has been invited as keynote or tutorial speaker to more than 30 conferences, is the organiser of various international workshops and special sessions at conferences, and the editor of several books, conference proceedings and special journal issues.

Tadahiko Murata

Tadahiko Murata received his Ph. D in 1997 from Osaka Prefecture University, Japan. After working for Ashikaga Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor, he joined the Faculty of Informatics, Kansai University as Associate Professor in 2001. Since 2009, he is Professor of that faculty. He directs Policy Grid Computing Laboratory, Kansai University funded by Japanese Government from 2005 to 2010. He was a visiting Professor at Computation Institute, University of Chicago from 2010 to 2011. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B, and Review of Socionetwork Strategies published from Springer. He was Chair of Technical Committee of Soft Computing, IEEE SMC Society, and is currently Chair of Technical Committee of Aware Computing, IEEE SMC Society, and Japan Chapter Chair of IEEE SMC Society during 2008-2011.

He received the Best Presentation Award in 1997 and 2005 from Institute of Systems, Control and Information Engineers (Japan), the Most Active Technical Committee Award in 2006 from IEEE SMC Society, the Best Presentation Award in 2009 in the International Workshop on Aware Computing. His research interest includes artificial intelligence, parallel and distributed computing, and social simulations.

Theme: Social Simulation Using Actual Data

Abstract: Aims of social simulation include predicting a future, finding reasons of current situations, or noticing problems of a target society. Recently this research field attracts a lot of researchers from computer science, artificial intelligence, economics, political science, and son on. However, most simulations are not based on actual data. That is, models of target societies are not tuned or identified by the actual data collected from their target societies. This is because the cost of collecting actual data from their target societies is expensive. Therefore, most researches tend to show their simulation results by varying values of parameters in their model and explain several scenarios according to the corresponding parameter values. From these simulation results, we are able to learn several lessons about the nature of target societies, though, it is difficult to see a quantitative results or consequences for them. In this talk, we show several trials to design and develop models of social simulations based on actually collected data from target societies. We employ multi-agent simulation models for our social simulations, and show simulation results for polling place assignment, for hospital scrap-and-build, and for national pension problems. We also show an approach for collecting actual data by using a web-based approach.