Lisbon Addictions 2019
Robin Purshouse attended the Lisbon Addictions conference, and presented in the Big data and innovative monitoring - round table.
Robin's talk was titled "Useful public health policy models need big data - but they also need theory".
GECCO 2019
Robin Purshouse and Tuong Vu attended the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in Prague, Czech Republic.
They presented their paper titled "Inverse generative social science using multi-objective genetic programming"
RSA 2019
Robin Purshouse and Alexandra Nielsen attended the 2019 meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Alexandra presented a poster entitled "synthesising the rational addiction and myopic choice economic models to explain population alcohol use and understand pricing policies: an agent based simulation".
Robin presented a poster "alcohol policy modeling using theory - a new computational platform for developing mechanism-based explanatory models"
KBS 2019
Charlotte Buckley and Alan Brennan attended the Annual Alcohol Epidemiology Symposium of the Kettil Bruun Society in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Charlotte presented a paper describing an agent-based simulation model of social roles and alcohol use and Alan presented a paper describing an individual-level simulation model of the normative underpinnings of population-level alcohol use.
Modeling Social Dynamics and Health Behavior Conference
Robin Purshouse was invited as an international guest speaker at the Modeling Social Dynamics and Health Behavior Conference in Pittsburgh, PA
The conference studied the complex contexts of health behaviours and the dynamic interactions of individuals with their social and physical environments, bringing together research leaders to discuss the integration of modelling approaches into the field of behavioural and community health sciences.
Robin’s talk presented a conceptual framework for health behaviours and its implementation as an agent-based computer modelling architecture that can accommodate multiple disciplinary perspectives simultaneously.
The framework derives from the mechanism-based tradition in social sciences (influenced by the work of Robert Merton, James Coleman, and more recently Peter Hedström) and enables both individuals and social structures to interact dynamically. Robin showed how this framework can be used to represent alternative mechanisms that have been theorised as causal factors or pathways for alcohol use.
He also demonstrated how such models can be grounded empirically in community contexts, to support policy makers in appraising and evaluating public health policy options and interventions.