Keynote Speaker

This year's keynote speaker will be Dr. Timothy Kohler, a Regents Professor in Anthropology at Washington State University and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Kohler's talk is titled "The Making of a Catastrophe: How Agent-Based Modeling is Helping Archaeologists Unravel the Last Century of Farming Occupation in the Northern US Southwest"

Tim was one of the very first scientists to apply agent-based modeling, and an ABM software platform, to real-world research problems in a field where simulation is not a traditional tool. Tim's "Village" project uses agent-based simulation to study the natural and social factors that influence settlement patterns in small-scale agrarian peoples. The project simulates settlement locations in southwestern Colorado over a 700-year period. He has been a Swarm user since the mid-1990s, and he also directs an NSF-funded IGERT at WSU and the University of Washington entitled "IGERT Program in Evolutionary Modeling." As a modeler, he says he "worships at the twin altars of CVOTW and KISS".