1. No category

Agent­Based and Hybrid Modeling Bootcamp & Incubator for Health Researchers 2015 Dates: ​
August 24­29, 2015 Location: ​
Spinks Addition S320 Teaching Lab, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada Capacity:​
Limited to 35 participants Fee:​
$600 for students & post­doctoral fellows, $1800 for academic faculty & staff and public sector attendees, $5000 for corporate attendees (​
a small number of volunteer positions are also available for trainees – see the workshop information at the end of this document.​
) ​
Participants from previous years of the bootcamp may attend at no charge, space permitting. Website:​
​
http://tinyurl.com/ABMBootcampIncubator2015 Registration: ​
http://tinyurl.com/ABMBootcampIncubator2015Reg
Contact​
: ​
[email protected] The Agent­Based and Hybrid Modeling Bootcamp & Incubator for Health Researchers is an intensive, hands­on tutorial and model incubator that seeks to provide health science researchers with ​
a systematic, practical and accessible introduction to agent­based and hybrid system science modeling for health and health care, using familiar language and concepts​
. Systems science methods presented and combined include agent­based modeling, System Dynamics modeling and discrete event modeling; some discussion will also be presented for Social Network Analysis. To help ease participants in overcoming the learning curve in applying the techniques to areas of individual interest, the “incubator” side of the event will further leverage the extensive experience of the instructor and teaching assistants to ​
provide ongoing advice, guidance, tips and direct assistance as participants build, explore and debug their own models addressing their research interests​
. Using lectures and guided exercises, the tutorial will introduce a broad set of topics in agent­based and hybrid modeling, offer optional material for those seeking additional depth of coverage, and emphasize the complementary insights when agent­based and hybrid modeling is combined with traditional health sciences approaches. Course material is drawn from the instructor’s semester­long interdisciplinary courses at MIT and the University of Saskatchewan, as well as previous bootcamps, including those hosted at UCLA, University of New South Wales, NCSU/UNC, Flinders University, and the Sax Institute. To make maximal use of the classroom experience, and in accordance to the principles of “flip teaching”, students will be asked to review ​
the instructor’s detailed, hands­on online training material outside of classroom hours; classroom time will review essential points, but will be primarily devoted to helping students take advantage of the unique features of the classroom by 1) leveraging the presence of the instructor and teaching assistance to conceptualize, formulate, specify and debug models customized to their research interests 2) conducting joint agent­based modeling exercises that build on and reinforce the basic material, and 3) engaging in richer discussion regarding specific questions and challenges identified by the students. The optional final day of the bootcamp will give participants the opportunity to brainstorm with the instructor and teaching assistants concerning ideas for modeling projects, and to discuss concrete design and implementation strategies for those projects. Session screencasts, diverse example models and case studies, interactive exercises, and custom­built tools to ease model insight and debugging will be made available for post­tutorial review. Optional tutorials will additionally be provided on programming concepts and skills required for intermediate and advanced agent­based modeling for health insight. Motivations Why Systems Science? Despite widespread progress in prolonging life over the past century, many illnesses continue to impose troublingly high health burdens. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of dramatic new health challenges, including the rise of complex, multi­factorial risk factors such as obesity, antibiotic and drug resistant pathogens, newly emerging infectious diseases that cross the animal­human interface, gaping and rising health disparities, and the emergence of syndemics of interacting illnesses. Although there is widespread recognition of the urgency of identifying and promoting policies that address such health challenges, formulating effective policies is dauntingly complex. While traditional analytical tools can offer much insight into public health gaps, there are significant methodological challenges in using such tools alone to understand the etiology of such disparities, and their implication for policy. These challenges reflect, among other things, the wide variety of interacting factors playing out over the life of an individual (often in feedbacks reflecting reciprocal causality), the broad ranges of timescales involved, the multiple levels of causation and effect (e.g., physiological and psychological mechanisms within individuals, surrounding layers of social and institutional context), widespread heterogeneities, the presence of bidirectional, delayed, gene­environment interactions, and discontinuous and time­varying causal interactions between factors within and between scales. Because of the interaction of diverse factors in shaping outcomes, there are also methodological challenges in using traditional approaches unassisted to identify effective, robust and cost­ effective ways to decrease the burden of illness. These interactions operate through many pathways, including immunologic, psycho­social, mental health, nutrition, and through the health care system. Studying such complex linkages purely using one methodology or tool is challenging and, all too often, ineffective. In recent years, a growing number of researchers in public health have addressed similar challenges by complementing traditional techniques with dynamic modeling approaches, such as Agent­Based Modeling, microsimulation, System Dynamics, and dynamic social network analysis. Such studies have shed much light on the interconnections between diverse causal factors, helped inform policy tradeoffs, interpret epidemiological trends, and prioritize data collection. Such models also serve as potent “learning prostheses” to enable us to learn more quickly, deeply, and robustly from the evidence available. Why Agent­Based Modeling? Agent­Based Modeling approaches serve as a particularly popular Systems Science technique due to a number of characteristics. Their capacity to capture heterogeneity ­­ both continuous and discrete ­­ at an individual and higher level; such heterogeneity often disproportionately shapes dynamics, and plays a central role in formulating targeted interventions, and is of central importance in understanding health equity concerns, and in formulating interventions that reduce health disparities. Secondly, by characterizing individual trajectories, agent­based models support a lifecourse perspective (permitting, for example, capturing the effects of early life exposures on later life outcomes), as well as interventions depending on such history. Both of these previous considerations further allow for grounding the model using longitudinal data in a way that is not possible using the aggregate perspective of cross­sectional models. Thirdly, such models are also confer great value for their ability to capture aspects of context. This includes spatial/geographic location of agents ­­ key for understanding, among other considerations, accessibility to resources such as grocery stores offering healthy foods, health care and allied health professional services facilities, walkable built environment, recreational resources, and for investigation of the impact of detailed interventions, such as those involving placement of resources. For many models, capturing context with respect to one or more networks (social networks, sexual networks, familial networks, needle sharing networks, service networks) is further of great interest, given the role that these networks play in shaping, for example, spread of knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, norms, and innovations. Reflecting the impacts of such context on choice sets and preferences, Agent­Based models further offer a strong support for capturing aspects of situated individual decision making. Fourthly, the capacity of such models to represent factors at multiple scales ­­ not just at an individual level, but also, for example, family, neighbourhood and region ­­ confers strong support for multi­level health analysis, and understanding the effects of portfolios of interventions that operate at or employ information at such different levels. Finally, the individual­based characterization supported by Agent­Based models often provides key support for securing buy­in from stakeholders who can contribute expertise and evidence speaking to that level of representation, and for whom an individual­level representation will secure additional degrees of buy­in and credibility. Why Hybrid Modeling? While each Systems Science technique approach can confer great value when applied in isolation, there are significant, textured and varied tradeoffs that obtain between the methods when applying dynamic modeling approaches to particular problems. These problems – which run the gamut from the capacity to capture longitudinal data, represent situated and localized decision­making, representing aspects network, spatial or multi­level context to communication barriers with stakeholders to performance challenges to human resource and skill sets – mean that the modeling approach best suited to characterizing one component of a system is sometimes poorly suited to others. Attempting to force­fit a single modeling approach onto the modeling effort can lead to diverse adverse outcomes, including – but not limited to – inability to investigate important issues of interest, difficulty in adequately characterizing intervention strategies, and models that are inflexible, or opaque and alienating to stakeholders. Within recent years, advances in modeling technology have opened the door to far more ready creation of hybrid and multi­scale models. In successive problems in diverse domains, such models offer greater capacity to respond to modeler intention, and capable of more precisely addressing research questions involved, as well as more adaptive to changes in modeling priorities and scope in light of model­related learning, easier to understand and communicate, and more flexible and versatile. In many models, the hybrid approach supports understanding in excess of what would be gained with independent and parallel pursuit of modeling in each distinct modeling approach, and sometimes likely greater than the sum of the insights that could be secured collectively from several single­approach investigations. Supported by a series of hands­on case studies of hybrid and multi­scale modeling in health and health­specific training examples, this event focuses on practical application of hybrid and multi­scale modeling and the criteria used to select among modeling types. Case studies will support participants in exploring and interacting with diverse health models that combine Agent­Based, System Dynamics and Discrete Event modeling, including ­­ but not limited to ­­ use of agents some of whose states are driven by System Dynamics stocks & flows, System Dynamics models that from which agents are individuated at a certain point in risk progression or where interacting agents drive flow rates, agent­based epidemiological models linked to discrete event models capturing patient care pathways and patient flow, multi­scale models, and case studies combining all three types of modeling. Emphasis will be placed on ensuring that participants can understand adapt the mechanisms in such models to their own circumstances. In addition to hybrid and multi­scale models, we will further examine how multiple modeling methods can be fruitfully combined in the same modeling project to yield ongoing insight. Instructor Dr. Nathaniel Osgood About the Instructor Nathaniel Osgood serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Associate Faculty in the Department of Community Health & Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan. His research – which has resulted in dozens of papers in peer­reviewed journals and conferences – is focused on providing tools to inform understanding of population health trends and health policy tradeoffs. Dr. Osgood has been applying systems science (particularly agent­based and System Dynamics modeling) to improve decision making (particularly in health) for over 25 years, including work conducted in the communicable, chronic and zoonotic disease areas, and to social and environmental epidemiology and tobacco policy. This work includes dozens of papers applying Agent­Based modeling and System Dynamics approaches to health issues. On the methodological front, Dr. Osgood has contributed multi­scale modeling and other approaches that hybridize agent­based models with System Dynamics and Social Networks Analysis approaches, techniques combining dynamic modeling with Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Sequential Monte Carlo statistical methods, combining simulation models with decision analytic approaches, and novel languages, scale­modeling approaches and architectures to reduce barriers to use of Agent­Based models. Complementing and informing his contributions to health modeling, Dr. Osgood is the co­creator of two novel wireless sensor­based epidemiological monitoring systems, and much of his current work seeks to synergize data science and systems science for health policy insight. On Since 2010, Dr. Osgood has directed popular Agent­Based modeling bootcamps for health scientists; his youtube videos offering education and training for health scientists on the basics of multiple types of dynamic modeling enjoy thousands of views per month from around the world. Screencasts of many of Dr. Osgood’s ABM courses, example health models, lecture notes, exercises and tutorials on relevant computational techniques are available at ​
http://tinyurl.com/ABMForHealth​
. Prior to joining the U of S faculty, Dr. Osgood earned a doctorate in Computer Science from MIT in 1999, and worked for many years in a number of academic and industry positions. Objectives and Audience The tutorial is designed to give a detailed, hands­on introduction to the application of agent­based and hybrid modeling to health decision making. The tutorial is specifically designed for health researchers who have no background in modeling, but who are interested in applications of modeling in the health area. While the tutorial will assume some familiarity with general terms from the health sciences, ​
no background in computer programming or mathematics is required​
. The tutorial is also suitable for those researchers previously familiar with some form of modeling but who are seeking to develop skill in agent­based modeling conducted with the AnyLogic software package. Course material presented here has been refined from presentations over the past four years to students with a variety of health science and veterinary science backgrounds. The large majority of the tutorial will be focused on Agent­Based and Hybrid Modeling in AnyLogic. The bootcamp will especially ways in which such methods can be synergistically combined to yield greater insight, but will draw on the instructors decades­long experience in applying multiple systems science approaches to characterize the tradeoffs between multiple systems science approaches so the participants have the best sense as to their natural regions of application. The tutorial will emphasize the practical benefits extending from the use of system science methods, and how such methods can be used in conjunction with traditional techniques. The primary objectives of the tutorial are the following: ●
●
●
●
●
●
To provide hands­on expertise in building agent­based and hybrid­models in AnyLogic; To provide participants a chance to plan implement their own articulated models with help by experienced modelers; To convey an understanding of how agent­based and hybrid systems science models can be used together with traditional tools of the health sciences, including epidemiological and biostatistical methods, administrative data, systematic reviews and meta­analyses; To provide participants access to sophisticated tools to assist with model analysis, understanding, debugging and management of the modeling process; To link participants in with a modeling support network of practitioners at all stages of expertise; To provide participants with a broad and evolving set of existing health and health care models and resources where they can secure further information. Teaching Style The tutorial will employ a hands­on teaching style where participants will learn concepts while interactively exploring existing modeling software, model structure and model results. The instructor will use examples to highlight unique features of agent­based models, and the types of questions on which they offer particular advantage, and limitations of such models. Registered participants will be given access to examples prior to the tutorial, and will be provided usable working copies of AnyLogic for the duration of the tutorial. Additional times will be set aside for experimenting with the modeling package, pursuing exercises, raising points for clarification, and brainstorming with modelers and TAs concerning possible modeling projects. Tutorial Contents The tutorial will consist of a set of plenary sessions covering in which the participants will build example models as guided by the instructor (and with a pool of teaching assistants circulating to assist). Such exercises aid the participant in exploring ways of applying the tool to investigate particular types of health issues, and building strengths in use of the platform. A large fraction of the event will be spent in sessions where participants will have opportunity to pursue their own modeling projects in teams or alone, or may opt to participate in parallel sessions covering more detailed or more technically demanding material. Optional Additional Sessions Additional background sections will be offered for practitioners interested in seeking broader background or deeper understanding of some modeling practices and supporting technologies. The particular set of sessions to be offered will depend on the balance student interest expressed in the candidate sessions. While we cannot guarantee that all topics listed below will be covered during the bootcamp, dedicated sessions will cover material of interest to participants in a prioritized fashion, and videos will be made available for those topics which could not be included within the bootcamp. ● Motivation for systems science methods in general, and agent­based modeling in particular ● Best practices for model building ● Model performance o Common performance vulnerabilities o Measuring performance using profilers o Effective strategy for improving model performance ● Helpful bits of Java for AnyLogic users who lack programming exposure but are interested in securing added flexibility when creating models, and deeper understanding of model plumbing. o Basic introduction to Java o Methods & functions o Classes & objects o Events o Types o Expressions o Statements o Using code in external Java libraries o Capturing hierarchies of related agents or resources: Subtyping and subclassing ● Simulating the flow and interaction of agents and resources in facilities: Discrete event modeling and visualization in AnyLogic ● Discussion on use of agent­based models for study planning, including evaluation of robustness of study design or statistical measures. Deliverables By the conclusion of the tutorial, each participant will be provided with the following: ●
●
●
●
●
●
Slides Exercises Models built by the participant during in­class exercises Example models provided to participants Models built by the participant with TA & instructor guidance References to more extensive learning opportunities (full courses, articles, books and model libraries) ● Guidance on accessing videos of course contents and related online material ● Custom­built tools to ease model insight and debugging Optional post­tutorial modeling brainstorming session The instructor and teaching assistants will be available to participants for a day of modeling brainstorming. This session will provide participants a chance to integrate and assimilate teachings from the tutorial session, and discuss application to their area of interest. Continuing Students Many students who come to the bootcamp find it helpful to participate in refresher sessions. Each year of the bootcamp is open without charge to previous participants, space permitting. Additional Resources Prospective students seeking to better understand bootcamp coverage or registered students seeking to gain early exposure to material are recommended to view materials from the instructor's recent courses (​
http://www.tinyurl.com/ConsensusABM​
).