Date: November 29, 2022
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: Informatics Institute E252, Gainesville, FL, 32611
Host: CISE
Admission: Free

Social Modeling for Informed Government & Commerce

Abstract: We are frequently surprised by major political, economic, and strategic outcomes that reflect the aggregate preferences, decisions, and actions of individual members of society: the technological marvels of our time have not improved our ability to model societies as much as one might have expected or hoped. How can we make better use of AI, the Internet, and mobile/pervasive computing to simulate and predict societal phenomena? In this talk, I will discuss a radical proposal to answer this question: a national-scale, agent-based simulation at the granularity of individual citizen actors that can serve as a simulation testbed for governmental and commercial decision-making.

Biography: Joe Marks is the CTO (Weta Digital) at Unity Software. He holds an AB in Applied Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University. His areas of expertise include AI, HCI, and CGI. He got his start in R&D by working on DARPA-sponsored simulation & training technologies, which produced an early example of a practically useful metaverse. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles on a broad variety of topics and managed large research groups at Mitsubishi Electric, Disney, and CMU. He has co-founded two startups.