Keynote Speaker: Professor Peter Sloot

 

Title: SimCity: Contagion, Crime, Sex and Drugs

 

Abstract

Cities are considered to be truly complex systems; the intricate interplay between the social and physical structures results in endless patterns of self-organization and adaptation, both being fundamental characteristics of such systems. Recent insights in allometric scaling by West and Bettencourt are tell-tales of a new science of cities build on this notion of complexity.
In my presentation I will summarize those results and argue that the driving force behind this complexity is the concept of Networks. I will then show some preliminary results we recently obtained by developing computational models that can absorb information on all scales to simulate the dynamics of urban crime and sexual transmittable diseases in dense urban systems.

Biography

Professor Peter Sloot is a Distinguished Research Professor and Professor of Computational Science at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is also Professor of Complex Systems at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Professor of Advanced Computing at ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia. He received his PhD (Computer Science) in 1988 and MSc (Chemistry) and MSc (Physics) in 1983, all from the University of Amsterdam. Peter writes “I try to understand how natural and man-made systems process information. I study this 'natural information processing' in complex systems by computational modeling and simulation as well as through formal methods. My work is applied to a large variety of disciplines. Recent work has been on the virology and epidemiology of infectious diseases, notably HIV, through Complex Networks, Cellular Automata and Agent Based Models. Recently I focused my work to socio-dynamics, particularly to understand the behavior and intervention of hidden criminal activities.”

Professor Peter Sloot currently leads two large EU projects: ViroLab and DynaNets and supervises research from various NIH, NSF and NWO and Royal Academy projects. He has supervised over 50 PhD Dissertations. He has published over 500 papers, books, chapters and edited volumes. He has given over 20 Radio and TV interviews on various scientific topics, including two documentaries on his work. He is Editor in Chief of “Journal of Computational Science” and “Future Generation Computing Systems”, both published by Elsevier. He is General Chair of the ICCS series of conferences on Computational Science. He has given an average of 8 international keynote talks and invited lectures per year over the past 5 years.