Welcome

Greetings social agent modelers, current and future:

NAACSOS stands for the North American Computational Social and Organization Sciences.

The evolution of this organization had its roots with a small group of researchers who were interested in how computational models could be applied to theoretical development and empirical analysis in the study of collectives. The early workshops were associated with INFORMS and run by Richard Burton (Duke), Kathleen Carley (CMU) and myself (then at CMU).

From those early times, we have evolved into a formal society with an associated journal (Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory) and affiliated organizations in Asia (PAAA – the Pacific-Asian Association for Agent-based Approach in Social Systems Sciences) and in Europe (ESSA, the European Social Simulation Association).

Our annual conference has retained many of the characteristics of those early workshops. We are highly interdisciplinary, with contributors from mathematics, medicine, sociology, public health, business, economics, computer science, engineering, physics, anthropology, and psychology. We also strongly support the development of Ph.D. students and encourage submissions by them. Our conference has generated remarkable opportunities to make contacts with individuals doing extremely interesting work. The purpose of our conference is to “connect” and that is why our submissions are restricted in length. We want to experience emerging work, new ideas, innovative approaches, and thoughtful commentary.

As a consequence, many students who have passed through the NAACSOS workshops and conferences are now faculty who now return with students of their own. As a consequence, many researchers now work with other researchers they have met at NAACSOS. As a consequence, many ideas and papers have their intellectual seeds planted from discussions at NAACSOS.

Welcome to NAACSOS.

Sincerely,
Michael Prietula, President
Email: prietula@bus.emory.edu
North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Sciences