I blogged a few weeks ago about the students on our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, and their take on twitter data collected by Fabian Neuhaus and Steven Gray. Since then they’ve been hard at work visualising bike data, cellular automata and agent-based models. Here are just a few examples of their work – you can see more on their blog aggregator.
Ian Morton‘s version of a 3D Game of Life Cellular Automata is particularly eye-catching, and his experiments with photographic techniques are really novel visualisation tools.
Meanwhile, Flora Roumpami produced a tool to take a raster image of a plan and turn it into an agent-based model which responds to the walls and boundaries of the architectural space. These are treated as a series of points with which the agents can interact and bounce off – an approach which simplifies the programming complexity but makes the computational cost quite a bit higher. In these situation, this is a trade-off. I thought this was an excellent tool – you’ll be able to see it soon on her blog.
Alistair Leak created a great “forest fire” CA a few weeks ago for the Cellular Automata assignment. He’s incorporated probabilistic fire-spreading models with wind and “fire breaks” – simulating how we can intervene to limit spread. (Again, it’s not there yet, but you can read about other examples of his work on his blog).
Martin Dittus created a wonderfully kaleidoscopic vis from Boris Bike data:
and his blog includes the work he’s done on cannibalistic ABMs and tile-shifting CAs.
Jack Harrison‘s Agent Based Model had more than a little of the zombie about it. His blog is a bit less bloodthirsty and more design-based. Robin Edwards‘ ABM was a bit more jolly – a celebration of The Beautiful Game.
The students’ next visualisation project is to integrate all the skills they’ve learned to create a larger exhibition for the end of next term. In the meantime, they’ll be exhibiting some of their work at the CASA Smart Cities conference on April 20th in London. If you are able to come, free tickets are available here.
And if this have whet you appetite, you can find more information about the CASA MRes here.
Sociable Physics 