| The Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) is the largest campus-based undergraduate university in the UK with a total student population of more than 37,000. Although it was awarded university status in 1992, its roots in higher education go back over 150 years. It has a number of research centres and groups that have worldwide excellence, one of which is the Centre for Policy Modelling (CPM). The Centre for Policy Modelling (CPM) is a dedicated research centre, which researches all aspects of social simulation, including: methodology, validation techniques, software tools, and applications (http://cfpm.org). It uses methods from computer science to understand aspects of human society and applies ideas from the social sciences to computer science. The CPM has developed to become a world-leading centre in agent-based simulation as applied to policy issues. It has also managed a number of trans-disciplinary projects, which integrate a variety of kinds of evidence. |
Key personnel
Prof. Bruce Edmonds: Director of the CPM and a Professor of Social Simulation. He is the coordinator of the project. His first degree was in Maths at Oxford, and his PhD in the Philosophy of Science at the University of Manchester. Crucially his research straddles social science, complexity science, and computer science. With his colleagues, he has developed the CPM from its founding in 1992 into one of the leading research centres in agent-based social simulation in the world, specialising in representing complex social/technical systems. He publishes widely on the methodology of modelling and the philosophy of complexity science. He is on the editorial board of: Interaction Studies, the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, and Complex Adaptive Systems Modelling. He is a founder member of the European Social Simulation Association and is active within the Complex Systems Society. As a result of past EU projects, he is embedded within the European community of complexity researchers.
Dr. Ruth Meyer: Graduated in Computer Science and Biology at Hamburg University, where she focussed on simulation and environmental informatics. She has over 10 years of experience modelling complex social systems during her PhD and subsequently at the CPM. She worked on the highly interdisciplinary CAVES and SCID projects, using disparate data/evidence sources to construct models suitable for the evaluation of policy options and consequences. She co-edited the handbook on “Simulating Social Complexity” with Bruce Edmonds for Springer in 2013 and 2017.