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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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IAST student Tarun Chaudhary will present his paper "Towards Mapping the Micro-foundations of Macro Political Ideas for Agent Based Political Simulation" as part of the requirements towards becoming a PhD candidate.
Abstract:
The paper uses the case of organized politically motivated violence to explore the conceptual linkages existing between the inter-agent and agent levels of Sun’s hierarchy for agent based modeling of social dynamics. This addresses, in a modest way, the issue of disciplines “talking past each other”. Specifically, social mobilization theory, which has a long history in social science, is shown to be compatible with Castelfranchi and Paglieri’s model of belief-based goal processing drawn from cognitive science. The case of Provisional Irish Republicanism is then used to demonstrate the framework’s usefulness for describing individual (agent) micro motivations that aggregate to form social movements displaying shared goals.