Paul Torrens
Assistant Professor, Arizona State University

Dr. Paul M. Torrens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University and an Affiliate in the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity. He holds a Ph.D. from University College London (2004), Master’s degrees from Trinity College Dublin (1999) and Indiana University (1998), and a Bachelor’s degree from Trinity College Dublin (1996). His research is focused on Geographic Information Science and development of geosimulation and geocomputation tools, applied modeling of complex urban systems, and new emerging cyberspaces. His projects have been supported by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Herberger Foundation, Science Foundation Arizona, Autodesk, Inc., and Alias Research. His work earned him a CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2007. (See http://geosimulation.org for more details.)

Sessions

11:15am Tuesday, 05/13/2008

Modeling Crowd Behavior

Location: Salon A-F

Paul Torrens (Arizona State University)

Ambient crowds are the new distributed computing platform. Smart mobs are fashioning new architectures for social networking. Armed with cell phones and mobile gaming devices, they are the new business model for location-based services. Seditious crowds are creating havoc in urban theaters of war and at global economic forums. Read more.

Wi-Fi Geographies

Paul Torrens (Arizona State University)

Despite their potential to revolutionize urban geography, the space-time properties of Wi-Fi-enabled urban infrastructure and the ubiquitous ambient network infrastructure of urban data clouds it supports have been given only cursory attention. This presentation will present a scheme for mining Wi-Fi clouds and analyzing and visualizing their geographies.