How running from zombies is the same as market behaviors

Abstract

What can we better understand if we attempt to model the world's complexity and emergent behavior?

The world is full of complex systems like traffic patterns, cells, and packs of zombies. How can we answer questions about these wildly different systems using a single toolkit? Complexity science is a genre of data science that looks at how the interactions of individual components of a system give rise to emergent patterns. By modeling individual components we can discover things like how to increase road capacity by 30% or which way to run if zombies were to attack. In the last 50 years, major jumps in methods and technology allow us to understand emergent behaviors of complex systems from biology to traffic networks. In this talk, Jackie will go over what complexity science is, how it fits in the ecosystem of data science, what tools exist in Python and how those relate to other tooling and approaches, and some of the practical applications.

About the Talk

• Type: keynote
• Expected length: 30min
• Intended audience: All

About the Author

Jackie is the author of Mesa, a Python-based agent-based modeling library, and sits on the Board of the Python Software Foundation. Her day job is working at Capital One. In her spare time she works on her Ph.D in Computational Social Science at George Mason University. Prior to Capital One she co-founded 18F, was a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and has worked at The Washington Post. She is the co-author of the O’Reilly book, Data Wrangling with Python. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, daughter, and two dogs.