Professor Michael Horn served as general chair of the five-day ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, hosted last month by Northwestern’s Center for Computer Science and Learning Sciences.
It is crucial for us as a society to educate students, from preschoolers and up, on recognizing and dealing with complexity. NetLogo models simulate complex systems in natural and social sciences, from pandemics’ dynamics, climate change and ecosystems to economics and voting.
An Agent-Based Model (ABM) is a category of a computational model for investigating actions and interactions of autonomous agents. The concept behind an ABM is the observation of simultaneous and multiple interactions of agents or programmed instructed entities through simulated environments. In developing these simulated environments, predictions of emergent phenomena can be evaluated. With an ABM, macro or high-level system properties can emerge from lower-level system interactions. Moreover, large scale state changes will emerge from micro-scale agent behaviors generated from system-level interactions. Such modeling techniques can be used to observe and evaluate new plant floor Machine-to-Machine (M2M) networked systems using Profibus or Modbus communication protocols. Also, thermodynamic materials properties of metals and plastics can be investigated using an ABM. In addition, NetLogo’s vast simulation library has an ABM of a Multilayer or Perceptron Artificial Neural Net tha