Joshua M. Epstein

SFI News:

The Santa Fe Institute will host a colloquium titled “Agent_Zero: Toward Neurocognitive Foundations for Generative Social Science” by Joshua M. Epstein of Johns Hopkins University, an SFI external professor.

The colloquium is 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13 in the Noyce Conference Room at SFI, 1399 Hyde Park Road in Santa Fe. The SFI host is Ben Althouse.

Abstract.  Professor Epstein will present Agent_Zero, a new theoretical entity developed under his NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and just published by Princeton University Press. Agent_Zero is a software individual endowed with distinct emotional/affective, cognitive/deliberative, and social modules.

Grounded in contemporary neuroscience, these internal components interact to generate observed, often far-from-rational, individual behavior. When multiple agents of this new type move and interact spatially, they collectively generate a wide range of dynamics spanning the fields of social conflict, psychology, public health, law, network science, and economics.