Seminar Title:Tangible participatory simulations to better take into account spatio-temporal dynamics in decision-making

Speaker: Arnaud Grignard – Research Scientist at French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), Research Affiliate at MIT Media Lab

Time: Thursday, March 21^st, 2024 | 1:30 – 2:30 P.M

Venue: C104

About the Seminar

The talk will illustrate the application of agent-based modelling for Urban Application such as mobility, energy consumption and social phenomena, with implications for both urban planning and environmental science. Key focus will be directed towards showcasing the utilization of the open-source framework Gama Platform and CityScope project. Arnaud Grignard, researcher at the IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development) and the MIT Media Lab in the CityScience group, will present insights gleaned from his collaborative work. One of the common threads will be to show how his methodologies and tools can be used for participatory science by building physical representations of cities and projecting data on it. With such an approach, not only it becomes possible to visualize behavior on a large scale, such as movements of people and vehicles but also to alter them to analyze the effects.  Particular emphasis will be placed on real-world applications, such as projects exploring the correlation between air quality and daily commuting patterns within urban environments.

About the Speaker

Arnaud Grignard is a computer scientist specializing in complex systems modeling and information visualization. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from l’université Pierre et Marie Curie-UPMC in 2015 where he co-developed a novel approach to agent-based simulation that handles real-time visualization tasks applied both to data and simulation outputs.  Since 2016, he’s been a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, focusing on coupling tangible interfaces and agent-based modeling for urban studies. He joins the IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development) as researcher in 2024.

His research enables evidence-based scenario modeling, promoting informed discussions about policy impacts using participatory approaches and citizen science. By creating artificial micro worlds and allowing the user to create and modify new scenarios in an iterative process his research not only helps to better understand the impact of new policies but also fosters a better-informed discussion of different futures. He’s one of the key developers of the GAMA Platform, facilitating spatially explicit simulations and one of the contributors and animators of the CityScience network.