Thursday, August 8, 2013


Ideas Seminar - Mirsad Hadzikadic
Date: August 7, 2013

 
Concerning procedures,
Professor Mirsad Hadzikadic presented about Complex System to explain diverse phenomena such as economics, sociology and other disciplines in order to better understand the nature of issues that our society is facing today. It would seem that ultimate goal of his work is to understand social networks, model infrastructure and how individual networks behave, using computing simulation and modeling.

Our society is becoming more complex and varied. What is the most complexity to me? I think, Social Networking. Social networking often involves grouping specific individuals or organizations together. Social networking is filled with millions of individuals, who are looking for meeting with other people, to gather and share information and experiences about something, and even finding employment. Everything could be done in social networking. The topics and interests are varied and rich. I think this is very complexity because there's no rules and hard to describe social patterns. Another important example of a complex system is an ecosystem including either individual organisms, or species and also relationship between predator-prey and host-parasite interactions. He illustrated birds moving involved playing different roles. I think it’s extremely difficult to identify their pattern of society. But he suggests research methods as computer simulation technologies.

In my opinion, IT is pervasive and pivotal in every process. It's an interdisciplinary skill you can't do anything without the use of computers these days. From his lecture, there are many interesting insights in the presentation and the comments. The most interesting part of lecture is ‘Netlogo’ which is an agent-based programming language and integrated modeling environment. It teaches programming concepts using agents in the form of turtles, patches, and the observer. He shows us a couple of examples about Netlogo simulation. It provides a conceptual approach, a high-level programming language, graphical interfaces, automated simulation experiments, etc. I think all computer simulations are very complicated. But Netlogo is simple enough that students and teachers can easily design and run computer simulations and serve as a powerful tool for researchers in many disciplines. I can understand how helpful this computer tools as well as Netlogo will be in the development of tools and techniques for studying complex system in many disciplines.

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