Mark Altaweel

University of ChicagoUniversity of Alaska

Argonne National Laboratory

Connecting the Dots:From Monitoring to Modeling

Social-Ecological Systems

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FERAL: Land Use and Water Systems Modeling

Agents concentrate at river sources nearest to White Mountain.

Citation: Altaweel, M.R., Alessa, L.N., Kliskey, A.D. 2009. Forecasting environmental resilience in Arctic societies. JAWRA 45(6):1379-1389

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Representation of Social Networks

Modeling approaches have also addressed how social networks interact in making resource decisions.

Citation: Altaweel, M.R., Alessa, L.N., Kliskey, A.D. 2010. Social influence and decision-making: Evaluating agent networks in village responses to change in freshwater. JASSS 13(1).

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Modeling and the “Big Picture”

Any applied modeling approach needs to accountfor the larger research goals. This requires theintegration of research steps.

Our focus has been on howto integrate data with models so that eventuallyIt can be a more automatedor semi-automated.

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Protocol Details

The integration of a data settingprotocol is intended to allowa semi-automated approachto integrating data and social-ecological models.

The key characteristics includethe inclusion of temporal, spatial,and information on social and environmental processes.

Citation: Altaweel, M.R., Alessa, L.N., Kliskey, A.D., Bone, C. 2010. A framework to structure agent-based modeling data for social-ecological systems. Structure and Dynamics 4(1).

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Structure of AIDA: Applying and Information Fusion Approach

Citation: Altaweel M.R., Alessa L.N., Kliskey A.D., Bone C.E. 2010. Monitoring land use: Capturing change through an information fusion approach. Sustainability 2(5):1182-1203.

Citation: Altaweel, M.R., Alessa, L.N., Kliskey, A.D. 2010. Visualizing situational data: Applying information fusion for detecting social-ecological events. Social Science Computer Review. doi:10.1177/0894439309360837

Information fusion can integrate both structured and unstructured data.

There is a real need to integrate qualitative as well as quantitative information.

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Protocol Integration with Information Fusion Tool

AIDA

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Finding Relationships

click on this

you get this

Data assessmentusing a networkperspective.

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Data Capture at Time Slice

Relationships between terms define what information and processes people report as significant.

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3D Network Display (1)

Assessing trends over time

Time span investigated

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3D Network Display (2)

village

community

sewer

construction

committee

road

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Displays of Data

Visualization with a variety of output display tools.This allows both structured and unstructured data to be evaluated.

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Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) for Trend Analysis

IDF value for Location 1

IDF value for Location 2

terms from term databases

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Link Relationships through V

V value for Location 1

V value for Location 2

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Fieldwork and Automated Approaches

To improve the speed and feedback between data capture and analysis, we will apply handheld device in capturing voice data. We will also apply traditional methods.

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Addressing the Full Scope of Research Goals

Information fusion techniques not only help to integrate data gathering with modeling, but the goal is to quicken the lag between data collection andmodel assessment.

More rapid assessments canmake it more practical tomodify or change the researchstrategy.

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Summary

Modeling addressing social-ecological systems cannot be done outside the larger research context that looks at the questions, data needs, and data gathering methodology.

There is a greater need to integrate disparate data from a variety of fields and sources in Alaska. Currently, there is difficulty in fully automating data collection with model integration, but we’ve had some success in semi-automated integration.

Information fusion offers a methodology that can allow us to integrate different types of social and environmental data (structured and unstructured data). Such data can be assessed for important spatial, temporal, and behavioral characteristics.

Our goal is to have a methodology developed so that data gathering is both more efficient and directly useful for constructing modeling approaches. This can informs us about significant social-ecological processes and what data needs are relevant for further collection.

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Availability of AIDA Tool and Interdisciplinary Research

Current availability of AIDA (Client and Server code):

http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/5/1182/

We have begun a collaborative research project with a political science researcher at the University of Massachusetts using AIDA to assess health care policy and how that is reported in the press.

Will be available (late 2010 or early 2011) on SourceForge

Questions, comments, ideas then please contact Mark Altaweel at: maltaweel@anl.gov or mraltawe@uchicago.edu

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Demo Video of AIDA