Project AIMSS
Adaptive Intelligent Model-Building for the Social Sciences
using Symbiotic Simulation

The AIMSS Project was a collaboration between the Schools of Computer Science and Public Policy at the University of Birmingham. It was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under the ESRC e-Social Science Programme  (Project RES-149-25-1053).

The AIMSS project is driven by an enduring social science Grand Challenge: How can the field of social sciences improve its understanding of real world and changing social dynamics and thus improve the quality of advice to policy makers, business and civic organizations about the impact of their interventions into society? The Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS) paradigm can provide a powerful methodology to support social science in this endeavor as it has the potential to improve the reliability of simulations used for decision support systems and can also assist with knowledge discovery and creativity in the social sciences domain. The AIMSS project has investigated the feasibility and challenges of utilising DDDAS for social science support. Following a cognitive systems approach, the project:

  • Developed an agent-based architecture for intelligent management of DDDAS-based modeling and analysis
  • Developed a prototype implementation applied to social housing simulations using CORE datasets. 
  • Addressed research challenges such as data generalization and interpretation, data consistency analysis and model adaptation

In addition to its novel research contributions, AIMSS has been a strategic and pioneering project:

  • It was one of the handful flagship projects funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under the ESRC e-Social Science Programme to "pioneer novel and experimental research into e-Social Science" and shape e-Social Science research agenda of the U.K.
  • It was the first ever funded DDDAS project in the UK and Europe
  • It has been one of the earliest efforts to explore and utilise DDDAS for Agent-based social simulations pioneering this research area.

People

Conferences

Software

  • AIMSS prototype simulation. Down the setup file and double click on it to install it.  Once installed, run the program as follows: Start->Programs->Housing Simulation->SimHome (java is needed).

Publications

  • Georgios Theodoropoulos, Catriona Kennedy, Peter Lee, Chris Skelcher, Edward Ferrari and Volker Sorge, “Data Driven Simulations in the Social Sciences” in “Handbook of Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems Vol II”, Editors: Darema, Frederica, Blasch, Erik, Ravela, Sai, Aved, Alex, Publisher: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-27986-7_29
  • C. Kennedy, G. Theodoropoulos, V. Sorge, E. Ferrari,  P. Lee and C. Skelcher,  “Data Driven Simulation to Support Model Building in the Social Sciences”,  Journal of Algorithms & Computational Technology. 2011;5(4):561-581., Special Issue on DDDAS, DOI:  10.1260/1748-3018.5.4.561
  • Catriona Kennedy, Volker Sorge, Georgios Theodoropoulos, "Detecting Rule Inconsistencies in Symbiotic Simulations", 5th Simulation Workshop (SW10), UK Operational Research Society, held in cooperation with ACM SIGSIM,  INFORMS Simulation Society and the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS), 23-24 March 2010, Worcestershire, England.  pp. 11-16. ISBN 9780903440462, 0903440466
  • Catriona Kennedy, Steven Griggs, Georgios Theodoropoulos, “Towards Participatory Development of Agent-Based Models”,  Electronic Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on e-Social Science, Manchester, June 18th-20th, 2008
  • Catriona Kennedy, Georgios Theodoropoulos, Chris Skelcher, Steven Griggs, Julie Christian and Glyn Humphreys, “Towards an e-Infrastructure for Enhancing Deliberative Democracy”, e-Research 08, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford,  9-11 September 2008.
  • Kennedy, C., Theodoropoulos, G., Sorge, V., Ferrari, E., Lee, P., Skelcher C., “Discovery Assistance for Evidence Based Model Development”, 3rd International Conference on e-Social Science, October 7-9, 2007, Ann Arbor, Michigan, US
  • Kennedy, C., Theodoropoulos, G., Sorge, V., Ferrari, E., Lee, P., Skelcher C., “AIMSS: A System for Data Driven Simulations in the Social Sciences”, Proceedings of the Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems - DDDAS 2007, in conjunction with the International Conference on Computational Science 2007  (ICCS 2007, Advancing Science and Society through Computation), Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China May 27-30, 2007, Pages: 1098 - 1105, ISBN:978-3-540-72583-1, DOI Bookmark: 10.1007/978-3-540-72584-8_144
  • Kennedy, C., Theodoropoulos, G., “Towards an Automated Approach to Dynamic Interpretation of Simulations”, Asia International Conference on Modelling and Simulation, Prince of Songkla University, Phuket, Thailand, in conjunction with Thailand’s 11th Annual National Symposium on Computational Science and Engineering (ANSCSE-11), 27-30 March 2007, pp.589-594, DOI Bookmark: 10.1109/AMS.2007.105  
  • P. Lee, E. Ferrari C. Kennedy , G. Theodoropoulos,  C.  Skelcher, “Assisted Model Building in the Social Sciences using Data Driven Simulation”, Electronic proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on e-Social Science, 28-30 June 2006, Manchester, UK.
  • Kennedy, C., Theodoropoulos, G., “Intelligent Management of Data Driven Simulations to support Model Building in the Social Sciences”, Proceedings the 20th ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2006), May 23–26, 2006, Raffles Hotel,Singapore.  Page: 132, ISBN ~ ISSN:1087-4097, 0-7695-2587-3, DOI Bookmark: 10.1109/PADS.2006.21
  • Kennedy, C., Theodoropoulos, G., “Intelligent Management of Data Driven Simulations to support Model Building in the Social Sciences”, Proceedings of the Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems - DDDAS 2006, The International Conference on Computational Science 2006 (ICCS 2006), Reading, UK May 28-31, 2006,  V.N. Alexandrov et al. (Eds.): ICCS 2006, Part III, LNCS 3993, Pages. 562-569. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.  ISBN 978-3-540-34383-7, DOI Bookmark: 10.1007/11758532_74
  • Kennedy, C., Theodoropoulos, G., “Adaptive Intelligent Modelling for the Social Sciences: Towards a Software Architecture”, Technical Report  CSR-06-11, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK, October 2006,. 19 pages.
  • Kennedy, C., Theodoropoulos, G., “Towards Intelligent Data-Driven Simulation for Policy Decision Support in the Social Sciences”, CSR-05-09, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK, October 2005.  17 pages