Tweets from President Obama's inauguration 2013-01-21

Following on from a previous post on agent-based modeling and elections. Here we show geo-located tweets during the day of President Obama's inauguration 2013-01-21.

If you want to explore what people are currently saying about President Obama check out our Geosocial Gauge Website.

Screen shot of Geo social Gauge. Clockwise from top left: Location of tweets, basic sentiment of tweets (green positive, red: negative and gray: neutral), most active countries tweeting and a word cloud of the most popular words in the tweets.

Employment Growth through Labor Flow Network

Omar Guerrero and Robert Axtell from the Department of Computational Social Science at GMU have recently published a paper in PLoS ONE entitled "Employment Growth through Labor Flow Networks." The work uses "newly available micro-data and the ability to work with large-scale, complex networks computationally, to study labor dynamics." Below is the abstract from the paper:

It is conventional in labor economics to treat all workers who are seeking new jobs as belonging to a labor pool, and all firms that have job vacancies as an employer pool, and then match workers to jobs. Here we develop a new approach to study labor and firm dynamics. By combining the emerging science of networks with newly available employment micro-data, comprehensive at the level of whole countries, we are able to broadly characterize the process through which workers move between firms. Specifically, for each firm in an economy as a node in a graph, we draw edges between firms if a worker has migrated between them, possibly with a spell of unemployment in between. An economy's overall graph of firm-worker interactions is an object we call the labor flow network (LFN). This is the first study that characterizes a LFN for an entire economy. We explore the properties of this network, including its topology, its community structure, and its relationship to economic variables. It is shown that LFNs can be useful in identifying firms with high growth potential. We relate LFNs to other notions of high performance firms. Specifically, it is shown that fewer than 10% of firms account for nearly 90% of all employment growth. We conclude with a model in which empirically-salient LFNs emerge from the interaction of heterogeneous adaptive agents in a decentralized labor market.

Communities of firms.

To find more latest news from CSS check out our Facebook page.

ABM & Elections

Ever wondered if agent-based models have been applied to look at elections? I recently came across a nice little NetLogo model by Michael Laver which is part of the book "Party competition: an agent based model" (2012).

This simple model allows users to explore the 2012 US presidential election campaign, Just like the election itself the model has two phases. 1) the  primary contest between the  Republican challengers.  2) The winner of the Republican primary then goes head to head with the Democratic incumbent.

GeoSocial Gauge

Over the last couple of months we have been working on getting our GeoSocial Gauge system up and running. The idea behind the website is to bring together social media and geographical analysis to monitor and explore people’s views, reactions, and interactions through space and time. It takes advantage of the emergence of social media to observe the human landscape as the living, breathing organism that it is: we can witness the explosion-like dissemination of information within a society, or the clusters of individuals who share common opinions or attitudes, and map the locations of these clusters. This is an unprecedented development that broadens drastically our understanding of the way that people act, react to events, and interact with each other and with their environment. We refer to this novel approach to study the integration of geography and society as GeoSocial Analysis.

The GeoSocial Gauge has several live streams ranging from exploring the political issues (e.g. Sequester) to to see what people are tweeting about TV (The Walking Dead).

Screen shot of GeoSocial Gauge of the Sequester. Showing the location of tweets, the most frequent words and whether or not the messages are positive (green) or negative (red).

Screen shot of GeoSocial Gauge of The Walking Dead.

Some of our initial work on this type of analyis can be found at:

• Stefanidis, T., Crooks, A.T. and Radzikowski, J. (2013), Harvesting Ambient Geospatial Information from Social Media Feeds, GeoJournal, 78, (2): 319-338.
• Crooks, A.T., Croitoru, A., Stefanidis, A. and Radzikowski, J. (2013), #Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System, Transactions in GIS, 17(1): 124-147.

Compuational Social Science @ GMU

The Department of Computational Social Science (CSS) at George Mason University is the first of its kind. It has active PhD, Master and Certificate programs in CSS. If readers are wondering what CSS is hopefully the quote from our Facebook page should help:

Computational Social Science is the interdisciplinary science of complex social systems and their investigation through computational modeling and related techniques. The field is at the intersection of social science and computer science and spans anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, and social psychology - as well as allied disciplines such as geography, history, organization theory, regional science, communication, and linguistics. We additionally utilize developments in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and related branches of behavioral science for understanding social phenomena.

Computational approaches utilized and taught within the department include agent-based social simulation models (multi-agent systems), social network analysis, mathematical analysis based on complexity theory, social geospatial modeling methods (GIS), and automated information and content analysis methods. Through such computational methods we provide our students with a unique toolset to investigate social phenomena.

If you are interested in finding out what the Department of CSS is doing or want to view some of our models you might like to check out our Facebook page.