2020-2022 SAFER: Evaluation to Inform Response (COVID-19: Healthcare Workers: an in-depth virological analysis and behavioural study during the outbreak) MRC/UKRI project MC_PC_19082, PI Dr. Eleni Nastouli, University College Hospitals London NHS Foundation Trust. Research Fellow in Agent-Based Modelling. My role in this project was the design and coding of an agent-based model of health-care worker movements in a hospital environment, specifically the University College Hospital "tower" building at 235 Euston Road London NW1 2BU. I was employed by the University of Leeds School of Geography, reporting to Prof. Ed Manley, July 2020-December 2021. I am currently continuing this work as a visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds.
2011-2012. Scottish Government’s RESAS research programme, work-package 4.2: Developing a Low Carbon Rural Economy. Team member. My planned work in this work-package was for deliverable 2: “Analysis of, and approaches to obtaining, the behavioural changes needed in rural businesses and consumers in order to achieve a low carbon rural economy” and deliverable 4: “Assessment of existing and novel approaches to governance (decision making) and institutions (implementation) to support transition to a low carbon rural economy”. Work for these deliverables is planned to draw on European FP7 project GILDED (see below) so far as consumers are concerned (continued analysis of GILDED survey data and modelling results), and with work in FP7 project LOCAW (see below) in its use of a novel combination of agent-based modelling and backcasting scenarios. (My participation ceased at the end of June 2012, when I left the James Hutton Institute.)
2011-2012. Scottish Government’s RESAS research programme, work-package 3.6: Understanding land managers’ attitudes and behaviour towards the management of environmental assets and responding to climate change. Team member. My planned work in this work-package was to contribute to deliverable 3: “How do land managers make decisions, and how do they trade-off between different environmental assets, including adaptation to and mitigation of climate change, and other (non-environmental) goods and services? What are the factors influencing these decisions?”, and deliverable 4: “What are effective strategies to influence land management decisions to address climate change and other environmental issues?”. The plan is to adapt an existing model of rural land use, PALM (People and Landscape Model) which includes facilities for calculating carbon emissions and sequestration, by giving it the ability to represent farmers who are not profit maximisers, but may be “satisficers” (sticking with an existing practice if it works “well enough”) affected by habit, imitation of successful neighbours, and the approval or disapproval of their peers derived from the model FEARLUS, on which I worked throughout my time at the Macaulay Institute and James Hutton Institute. A role-playing game will be used to elicit information about how land use and land management decisions are taken. (My participation ceased at the end of June 2012, when I left the James Hutton Institute.)
2011-2012. LOCAW: LOw Carbon At Work. Co-investigator. LOCAW (Low Carbon at Work, www.locaw-fp7.com) is a project funded by the European Union under the Framework Seven Programme, running from January 2011 to December 2013. I took a leading role in writing the research proposal, which was awarded 14.5 out of 15 by the European Commission’s expert reviewers. The overall goal of LOCAW is to identify factors helping and hindering moves toward low-carbon, sustainable practices within large organizations and by their employees. The case-study organizations include a university, a local authority, and light and heavy private industry firms. It is led by Prof. Ricardo Garcia Mira and colleagues at the University of Coruña, Spain, in partnership with the Macaulay Institute[1], Scotland, the University of Umeå, Sweden, the Western University of Timisoara, Romania, the University of Surrey, England, the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and the Centre for Inter-University Research on Environmental Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Agent-based modeling is central to the project design: the plan is to use it in conjunction with “backcasting” scenarios derived from interviews and focus group discussions with employees of the case study organizations. For each organization a desired future state (at 2050) of aspects of the organization related to energy use, waste, and work-related travel will be constructed, along with possible paths to that state. Modeling will be used to test the plausibility of those paths under a range of assumptions. (My participation ceased at the end of June 2012, when I left the James Hutton Institute.)
2009-2012. PolicyGrid II: Supporting Interdisciplinary Evidence Bases for Scientific Collaboration and Policy Making. Consultant. PolicyGrid II explored computational support for integrative research which attempts to bring together investigators from traditional, disparate disciplines in order to address major issues and problems, e.g. those concerning human-environment interactions and the sustainability of human societies facing natural resource depletion and environmental degradation. It was led by Professor Pete Edwards, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen.
2008-2012. GILDED. Governance, Infrastructure, Lifestyle Dynamics and Energy Demand: European Post-Carbon Communities. Coordinator. GILDED (Governance, Infrastructure, Lifestyle Dynamics and Energy Demand, www.gildedeu.org) is an interdisciplinary social science project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme, running from December 2008-April 2012. The GILDED proposal, received a mark of 14.5 out of 15 from the expert evaluators in the funding process. Its goal is to identify social, economic, cultural and political changes which could help households in Europe consume less carbon-intensive energy. It is led by Macaulay Institute in partnership with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the Sociological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic.
Each GILDED partner had a case study area consisting of a medium-sized city and its hinterland; the main output will be a series of policy briefs, covering scales from local community upwards. For each case study area, a stakeholder advisory group was recruited and met at least annually; the Scottish stakeholder advisory group included an MSP and representatives of Scottish and local government, among others. The project integrated qualitative and quantitative field work with research using publicly available documents and statistics, and agent-based modelling. Some of those completing a detailed questionnaire on domestic energy use, and a carbon calculator for their home, were invited to commit to reducing their energy use by a specific amount over a year; and the effects of this, and of giving these subjects additional information, were tested using a repeat survey, comparing any changes they make with those made by the rest of those completing the questionnaire. An agent-based model was developed to explore scenarios of energy demand under a range of policy environments up to 2050, focusing on the Scottish case study. Results from the project are still being written up.
2006-2011. Scottish Government RERAD Research Programme 3: Environment – Land Use and Rural Stewardship Work package 3.8: Protection and Enhancement of Landscapes and Rural Communities. Team member; module leader 2006-8. The research undertaken in this work-package extended the existing FEARLUS agent-based model of land use change (see below) to incorporate pollution, incentives to cut pollution, social processes concerning peer approval and disapproval among farmers, and behaviour under more than one goal (e.g. economic success and peer approval). It was closely linked with work in CAVES, described below.
2006-2009. PolicyGrid. Consultant. Headed by Prof. Pete Edwards of the University of Aberdeen Department of Computing Science, and Prof. John Farringdon of the University of Aberdeen Dept. of Geography and the Environment. PolicyGrid was a research node for the ESRC National Centre for eSocial Science located at the University of Aberdeen. It expanded the work carried out under the 2004-5 “Pilot Semantic Grid Service for Environmental Modelling” described above, to explore the costs and benefits of using proposed “Semantic Grid” standards and methodology in tasks related to policy development and appraisal.
2005-2008. CAVES: Complexity: Agents, Volatility, Evidence and Scale. Co-investigator. This was an EU-funded Framework 6 STREP, commissioned under the NEST (New and Emerging Science and Technology) Pathfinder initiative on “Tackling Complexity in Science”. The coordinator was Prof. Scott Moss of Manchester Metropolitan University, and universities and research institutes from UK, Germany, Austria, Poland, Sweden, South Africa and Australia were involved. The CAVES project aimed to couple policy concerns for complex human-environmental systems with linked physical, biological and social models based soundly in complexity science. These models were developed from a set of case studies of land use change, focused on the effect social networks have on the resilience of land use systems in the face of external shocks such as sudden price changes, or livestock disease epidemics.
2004-2005. Comparative Agent-Based Modelling of Territorial Resource Allocation Processes. Project leader. This was a collaborative project with Prof. Claudio Cioffi-Revila and Dr. Dawn Parker of the Center for Social Complexity, George Mason University (of which Cioffi-Revilla is Director). It was aimed at development of approaches to simulation modelling of competition for teritory, across the domains of land use, international politics, urban development, plant ecology and ethology. Funded by the Macaulay Development Trust.
2004-2005. Pilot Semantic Grid Service for Environmental Modelling. Co-investigator. Headed by Pete Edwards and Alun Preece of the University of Aberdeen Department of Computing Science. The central aim of this demonstrator project was to make FEARLUS available (as “FEARLUS-G”) using “Semantic Grid” technologies and methods, demonstrating the feasibility of large-scale collaborative environmental simulation experiments making use of distributed resources. The project was funded by ESRC.
2004-2005. Development of a rural economy and land use simulation modelling strategy. Co-investigator. This project was carried out under the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme of research funded by three UK research councils (ESRC, NERC, BBSRC). Its aim was to assess the potential of agent-based modelling (ABM) as an alternative to traditional integrated assessment modelling as a way of linking the biophysical and socio-economic characteristics of a socio-ecological system.
2003-2006. Spatially Explicit, Agent-Based Simulations of Land Use Change: Exploiting and Enhancing the FEARLUS Modelling System. Project leader. The project aimed to improve understanding of rural land use change and the forces promoting and retarding it, primarily in the medium to long term, and particularly but not exclusively in Scotland. The enhancements concentrated on improving modellers’ ability to work flexibly with multiple spatial, temporal and organizational scales, and models having different degrees of abstraction. Funded by the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department (SEERAD).
2003-2005. Appraisal of Sustainable Rural Policy and Land Use (SURPLUS) Scoping Study. Co-investigator. This scoping study formed part of the Department of Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Horizon Scanning Programme, aimed to assess the feasibility of using various modeling and other foresight approaches. Participation has involved reviewing one of these approaches: agent-based modeling. Funded by DEFRA and the Treasury’s Evidence-Based Policy Fund.
2001-2006. Development of socio-economic methods to synthesise stakeholder priorities – using implementation of the Water Framework Directive as a case study. Team member. This was an inter-disciplinary project, involving social scientists, hydrologists and agent-based modellers. The EU Water Framework Directive requires the development of decision frameworks, including social, economic and scientific aspects, to assist in the management of water basins. FEARLUS was linked to a distributed pollutant transport model. Funded by SEERAD.
2000-2004. A conceptual framework for modelling complex, adaptive agro-ecosystems: just enough detail to see the crops, not so much as to lose the field. Co-leader. This was a collaborative project with Dr. Tim Lynam of the University of Zimbabwe, aimed at developing approaches to modelling agro-ecosystems in which events and entities at a wide range of scales need to be considered. Funded by the Macaulay Development Trust.
1998-2003. Framework for Evaluation and Assessment of Regional Land Use Scenarios (FEARLUS). Team member; project leader from April 2001. The aim of the project was to develop a framework for agent-based modelling of land use change at a regional scale. Initially employed as simulation modeller, mainly concerned with developing the theoretical foundations of agent-based modelling of socio-ecosystems, and with the high-level design of FEARLUS. FEARLUS was developed using the Swarm libraries, in the object-oriented language Objective-C. Funded by the Scottish Office Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries Department.
[1] The formalities of the change from the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute to the James Hutton Institute are not yet completed. Until they are, European Framework 7 projects remain registered with Macaulay Institute.
2011-2012. Scottish Government’s RESAS research programme, work-package 4.2: Developing a Low Carbon Rural Economy. Team member. My planned work in this work-package was for deliverable 2: “Analysis of, and approaches to obtaining, the behavioural changes needed in rural businesses and consumers in order to achieve a low carbon rural economy” and deliverable 4: “Assessment of existing and novel approaches to governance (decision making) and institutions (implementation) to support transition to a low carbon rural economy”. Work for these deliverables is planned to draw on European FP7 project GILDED (see below) so far as consumers are concerned (continued analysis of GILDED survey data and modelling results), and with work in FP7 project LOCAW (see below) in its use of a novel combination of agent-based modelling and backcasting scenarios. (My participation ceased at the end of June 2012, when I left the James Hutton Institute.)
2011-2012. Scottish Government’s RESAS research programme, work-package 3.6: Understanding land managers’ attitudes and behaviour towards the management of environmental assets and responding to climate change. Team member. My planned work in this work-package was to contribute to deliverable 3: “How do land managers make decisions, and how do they trade-off between different environmental assets, including adaptation to and mitigation of climate change, and other (non-environmental) goods and services? What are the factors influencing these decisions?”, and deliverable 4: “What are effective strategies to influence land management decisions to address climate change and other environmental issues?”. The plan is to adapt an existing model of rural land use, PALM (People and Landscape Model) which includes facilities for calculating carbon emissions and sequestration, by giving it the ability to represent farmers who are not profit maximisers, but may be “satisficers” (sticking with an existing practice if it works “well enough”) affected by habit, imitation of successful neighbours, and the approval or disapproval of their peers derived from the model FEARLUS, on which I worked throughout my time at the Macaulay Institute and James Hutton Institute. A role-playing game will be used to elicit information about how land use and land management decisions are taken. (My participation ceased at the end of June 2012, when I left the James Hutton Institute.)
2011-2012. LOCAW: LOw Carbon At Work. Co-investigator. LOCAW (Low Carbon at Work, www.locaw-fp7.com) is a project funded by the European Union under the Framework Seven Programme, running from January 2011 to December 2013. I took a leading role in writing the research proposal, which was awarded 14.5 out of 15 by the European Commission’s expert reviewers. The overall goal of LOCAW is to identify factors helping and hindering moves toward low-carbon, sustainable practices within large organizations and by their employees. The case-study organizations include a university, a local authority, and light and heavy private industry firms. It is led by Prof. Ricardo Garcia Mira and colleagues at the University of Coruña, Spain, in partnership with the Macaulay Institute[1], Scotland, the University of Umeå, Sweden, the Western University of Timisoara, Romania, the University of Surrey, England, the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and the Centre for Inter-University Research on Environmental Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Agent-based modeling is central to the project design: the plan is to use it in conjunction with “backcasting” scenarios derived from interviews and focus group discussions with employees of the case study organizations. For each organization a desired future state (at 2050) of aspects of the organization related to energy use, waste, and work-related travel will be constructed, along with possible paths to that state. Modeling will be used to test the plausibility of those paths under a range of assumptions. (My participation ceased at the end of June 2012, when I left the James Hutton Institute.)
2009-2012. PolicyGrid II: Supporting Interdisciplinary Evidence Bases for Scientific Collaboration and Policy Making. Consultant. PolicyGrid II explored computational support for integrative research which attempts to bring together investigators from traditional, disparate disciplines in order to address major issues and problems, e.g. those concerning human-environment interactions and the sustainability of human societies facing natural resource depletion and environmental degradation. It was led by Professor Pete Edwards, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen.
2008-2012. GILDED. Governance, Infrastructure, Lifestyle Dynamics and Energy Demand: European Post-Carbon Communities. Coordinator. GILDED (Governance, Infrastructure, Lifestyle Dynamics and Energy Demand, www.gildedeu.org) is an interdisciplinary social science project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme, running from December 2008-April 2012. The GILDED proposal, received a mark of 14.5 out of 15 from the expert evaluators in the funding process. Its goal is to identify social, economic, cultural and political changes which could help households in Europe consume less carbon-intensive energy. It is led by Macaulay Institute in partnership with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the Sociological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic.
Each GILDED partner had a case study area consisting of a medium-sized city and its hinterland; the main output will be a series of policy briefs, covering scales from local community upwards. For each case study area, a stakeholder advisory group was recruited and met at least annually; the Scottish stakeholder advisory group included an MSP and representatives of Scottish and local government, among others. The project integrated qualitative and quantitative field work with research using publicly available documents and statistics, and agent-based modelling. Some of those completing a detailed questionnaire on domestic energy use, and a carbon calculator for their home, were invited to commit to reducing their energy use by a specific amount over a year; and the effects of this, and of giving these subjects additional information, were tested using a repeat survey, comparing any changes they make with those made by the rest of those completing the questionnaire. An agent-based model was developed to explore scenarios of energy demand under a range of policy environments up to 2050, focusing on the Scottish case study. Results from the project are still being written up.
2006-2011. Scottish Government RERAD Research Programme 3: Environment – Land Use and Rural Stewardship Work package 3.8: Protection and Enhancement of Landscapes and Rural Communities. Team member; module leader 2006-8. The research undertaken in this work-package extended the existing FEARLUS agent-based model of land use change (see below) to incorporate pollution, incentives to cut pollution, social processes concerning peer approval and disapproval among farmers, and behaviour under more than one goal (e.g. economic success and peer approval). It was closely linked with work in CAVES, described below.
2006-2009. PolicyGrid. Consultant. Headed by Prof. Pete Edwards of the University of Aberdeen Department of Computing Science, and Prof. John Farringdon of the University of Aberdeen Dept. of Geography and the Environment. PolicyGrid was a research node for the ESRC National Centre for eSocial Science located at the University of Aberdeen. It expanded the work carried out under the 2004-5 “Pilot Semantic Grid Service for Environmental Modelling” described above, to explore the costs and benefits of using proposed “Semantic Grid” standards and methodology in tasks related to policy development and appraisal.
2005-2008. CAVES: Complexity: Agents, Volatility, Evidence and Scale. Co-investigator. This was an EU-funded Framework 6 STREP, commissioned under the NEST (New and Emerging Science and Technology) Pathfinder initiative on “Tackling Complexity in Science”. The coordinator was Prof. Scott Moss of Manchester Metropolitan University, and universities and research institutes from UK, Germany, Austria, Poland, Sweden, South Africa and Australia were involved. The CAVES project aimed to couple policy concerns for complex human-environmental systems with linked physical, biological and social models based soundly in complexity science. These models were developed from a set of case studies of land use change, focused on the effect social networks have on the resilience of land use systems in the face of external shocks such as sudden price changes, or livestock disease epidemics.
2004-2005. Comparative Agent-Based Modelling of Territorial Resource Allocation Processes. Project leader. This was a collaborative project with Prof. Claudio Cioffi-Revila and Dr. Dawn Parker of the Center for Social Complexity, George Mason University (of which Cioffi-Revilla is Director). It was aimed at development of approaches to simulation modelling of competition for teritory, across the domains of land use, international politics, urban development, plant ecology and ethology. Funded by the Macaulay Development Trust.
2004-2005. Pilot Semantic Grid Service for Environmental Modelling. Co-investigator. Headed by Pete Edwards and Alun Preece of the University of Aberdeen Department of Computing Science. The central aim of this demonstrator project was to make FEARLUS available (as “FEARLUS-G”) using “Semantic Grid” technologies and methods, demonstrating the feasibility of large-scale collaborative environmental simulation experiments making use of distributed resources. The project was funded by ESRC.
2004-2005. Development of a rural economy and land use simulation modelling strategy. Co-investigator. This project was carried out under the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme of research funded by three UK research councils (ESRC, NERC, BBSRC). Its aim was to assess the potential of agent-based modelling (ABM) as an alternative to traditional integrated assessment modelling as a way of linking the biophysical and socio-economic characteristics of a socio-ecological system.
2003-2006. Spatially Explicit, Agent-Based Simulations of Land Use Change: Exploiting and Enhancing the FEARLUS Modelling System. Project leader. The project aimed to improve understanding of rural land use change and the forces promoting and retarding it, primarily in the medium to long term, and particularly but not exclusively in Scotland. The enhancements concentrated on improving modellers’ ability to work flexibly with multiple spatial, temporal and organizational scales, and models having different degrees of abstraction. Funded by the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department (SEERAD).
2003-2005. Appraisal of Sustainable Rural Policy and Land Use (SURPLUS) Scoping Study. Co-investigator. This scoping study formed part of the Department of Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Horizon Scanning Programme, aimed to assess the feasibility of using various modeling and other foresight approaches. Participation has involved reviewing one of these approaches: agent-based modeling. Funded by DEFRA and the Treasury’s Evidence-Based Policy Fund.
2001-2006. Development of socio-economic methods to synthesise stakeholder priorities – using implementation of the Water Framework Directive as a case study. Team member. This was an inter-disciplinary project, involving social scientists, hydrologists and agent-based modellers. The EU Water Framework Directive requires the development of decision frameworks, including social, economic and scientific aspects, to assist in the management of water basins. FEARLUS was linked to a distributed pollutant transport model. Funded by SEERAD.
2000-2004. A conceptual framework for modelling complex, adaptive agro-ecosystems: just enough detail to see the crops, not so much as to lose the field. Co-leader. This was a collaborative project with Dr. Tim Lynam of the University of Zimbabwe, aimed at developing approaches to modelling agro-ecosystems in which events and entities at a wide range of scales need to be considered. Funded by the Macaulay Development Trust.
1998-2003. Framework for Evaluation and Assessment of Regional Land Use Scenarios (FEARLUS). Team member; project leader from April 2001. The aim of the project was to develop a framework for agent-based modelling of land use change at a regional scale. Initially employed as simulation modeller, mainly concerned with developing the theoretical foundations of agent-based modelling of socio-ecosystems, and with the high-level design of FEARLUS. FEARLUS was developed using the Swarm libraries, in the object-oriented language Objective-C. Funded by the Scottish Office Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries Department.
[1] The formalities of the change from the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute to the James Hutton Institute are not yet completed. Until they are, European Framework 7 projects remain registered with Macaulay Institute.