News
This is an archive of all SwarmWiki news.
Swarm News
SDG Google Summer of Code students and Projects from 2008
Swarm Development Group were assigned two students by Google's Summer of Code program, Haruka Matsuzaki and Pavel Vinogradov. Pavel is investigated ways to describe models using ontologies and Haruka looked at ways to control simulations by wire using a web browser, and probably using XML-RPC. Pavel has contributed a wiki page on 2008 Summer of Code which you can find here.Swarm for Ubuntu and Debian Linux
Jakson Aquino produced detailed instructions for making Swarm from source on Ubuntu/Debian Linux, and some binaries for Ubuntu 7.04. Thank you Jakson!SDG accepted as mentor organization in Google Summer of Code 2008
Swarm Development Group has again been accepted for Google's Summer of Code program, which pays student programmers to work on open-source projects. Please spread the word to any interested students. Our list of potential projects and guidelines for application are here.SwarmFest 2008 Call for Papers!
Preparations for SwarmFest 2008 are well underway. Our host will be Dr. Gary An at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Registration and opening reception are scheduled for the evening of May 11, with technical sessions on the 12th-13th. This venue is in the heart of the exciting cultural and social center of Chicago but some very special sponsors are helping us keep costs low. We are also working hard to organize several special focus areas. Please download and circulate the preliminary call for papers (PDF). Additional information will be posted here as planning proceeds.Preliminary announcement: SwarmFest 2008!
Swarm Development Group is happy to announce advance plans for SwarmFest 2008. Dr. Gary An has offered to host at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Registration and opening reception are scheduled for the evening of May 11, with technical sessions on the 12th-13th. The 2007 SwarmFest in Chicago (see below) was a great success and we look forward to returning. Additional information will be posted as planning proceeds.Swarm Email lists restored after temporarily outage, 6 Feb 2008
The Swarm Development Group email lists---support@swarm.org, modelling@swarm.org, and others---were temporarily down on 6 Febuary, but are now working again. If you have any problems posting to them, contact us using the directions for submitting a news item, below.New release of EcoLab for C++ modellers
Russell Standish is pleased to announce the release of Ecolab.4.D25. This is the first major release of EcoLab for almost 2 years, and consists of a major effort to eliminate all known bugs in the package, prior to starting work on EcoLab 5. There are a few new features added as well. See http://ecolab.sourceforge.net
Russell also announces:
"EcoLab 5 represents an opportunity to redesign/refactor the package, retaining all the good points of Ecolab 4. At this stage, no code has been written, but it is just a concept in my mind to make this an even better C++ ABM environment. I'd like to open up discussion with the modelling community to see what people would like. I'm particularly interested to hear from people interested in using C++, and who use EcoLab now, or have tried EcoLab and found it wanting, just what it is you'd like in a C++ modelling package." Please contact Russell if you are interested in a C++ platform for agent-based modeling.Xholon project implements "StupidModel" template agent-based models
Xholon is an open-source modeling platform that supposed agent-based models. Ken Webb of the Xholon project recently demonstrated this platform's capabilities by implementing all 16 of the "StupidModel" template ABMs, which have also been implemented in Swarm, Repast, NetLogo, and other platforms. See the template code page for additional information. Information on Xholon is at: http://www.primordion.com/Xholon and https://sourceforge.net/projects/xholon/
Swarm and Objective-C++
Objective-C++ is a new addition to the gcc compiler that allows code to mix Objective-C and C++. Marcus Daniels and Gennady Telegin just developed a version of Swarm that works with the Objective-C++ compiler, making a new way to obtain the advantages of both C++ (e.g., many libraries; better speed) and Swarm. See the FAQ on C++ and Swarm.Swarm Development Group Mentors 3 Google Summer of Code Students
Swarm Development Group has been approved to mentor 3 students by Google's Summer of Code program. Welcome Nima Talebi, Gennady Telegin, and Joris Kluivers; who will be mentored by Scott Christley and Marcus Daniels.SwarmFest 2007 Presentations and Pictures
We now have an archive page up for SwarmFest 2007. Take a look for pictures and presentations by many of the speakers.
SwarmFest 2007 registration is now open! Abstract submission extended to June 18
Registration for SwarmFest is now open. Early registration ends June 16, but you can continue to register any time up to the start of the conference. Please register early especially to reserve low-cost housing.
We have extended the abstract submission deadline to June 18. We will notify authors of acceptance within one week.
The registration form has been having intermittent problems we are trying to get fixed. If you attempt to register via the form at the SwarmFest web site be assured that it collected your information and you will be expected at SwarmFest.
Full-day classes (July 12) on NetLogo and Repast are available to a limited number of people; register for these as part of SwarmFest registration. There is an additional fee of $45 for these classes.
SwarmFest will be July 12-14 at DePaul University in downtown Chicago. SwarmFest2007 features: an exciting location, inexpensive housing, easy transportation, tutorials in agent-based modeling software, a banquet presentation by Dr Tim Kohler (a long-time Swarm user and Santa Fe Institute faculty member whose award-winning "Village" project pioneered the application of agent-based modeling in anthropology and archeology), a variety of other interesting speakers, plus free t-shirts!
The conference web site includes the Call for Papers, with details on registration, cost, etc.Announcing SwarmFest 2007!
SDG is very happy to announce that this year's SwarmFest will be July 13-14 in the exciting heart of downtown Chicago. Our hosts will DePaul University's School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems. Click here for the full announcement; a call for papers will be released soon.New Wiki Content: Speed-ups
New material on the Swarm FAQ section of the wiki discusses ways to make a model run faster, including use of the Objective-C profiler. Some methods apply to non-Swarm models. This topic was a strong interest of the user community expressed at SwarmFest 2006. See the FAQ section on run-time problems.NAACSOS 2007 Conference
The North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science announces its 2007 conference, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA; June 7-9. The conference will include tutorials in NetLogo, Repast, and MASON software and Dynamic Network Analysis. See: http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/events/conferences/2007/Swarm and Google Summer of Code 2007
Swarm Development Group has been accepted as a participating open-source software project for Google's Summer of Code program, and proposals are now being accepted. Interested students should see our ideas page.Village Project Wins Award
The Village project at Washington State University is one of the oldest Swarm applications, studying social and environmental interactions in the prehistoric cultures of the American southwest. Their recent paper "Modeling Historical Ecology, Thinking about Contemporary Systems" just received an award for "Exemplary Cross Sub-Field Research". See the wiki's Agent-Based_Models_in_Culture/Anthropology page for details and a link. Congratulations to Tim Kohler and his team.--SFRailsback 23:13, 14 Nov 2006 (EST)
Intermittent Outages of SDG Wiki and Servers
The Center for Study of Complex Systems at University of Michigan is moving the servers that host this wiki and the Swarm/SDG email lists. Intermittant outages are expected for the next few days.NAACSOS 2007 Conference Call for Papers
The North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science announces its 2007 conference, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA; June 7-9. Papers are due February 9, 2007. The conference will include tutorials in NetLogo, Repast, and MASON software and Dynamic Network Analysis. See: http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/events/conferences/2007/Call for Papers: Agent-Directed Simulation (ADS'07) Symposium
A call for papers has just been issued for: Agent-Directed Simulation Symposium (ADS'07), part of the 2007 Spring Simulation Multiconference (SpringSim'07), sponsored by The Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS). The meeting will be March 25- 29, 2007, Norfolk, VA, USA. The call for papers and information is at: http://www.eng.auburn.edu/SCS-TM/ADS-2007.htmSwarmFest 2006 followup
SwarmFest was hosted by University of Notre Dame, June 23-24. Thanks to our host Greg Madey, we will soon be posting pictures from the conference. Thank you to all the presenters, moderators, etc. who helped make SwarmFest another success.SwarmFest 2006 registration open
Registration for SwarmFest is now open! SwarmFest is our annual conference of agent-based modelers and Swarm users. It will be hosted by University of Notre Dame, June 23-24. See the conference web site for submitting abstracts, deadlines, registration, etc.New wiki content for Repast, MASON, NetLogo, and Swarm: template models and IDEs
New pages in the ABM Resources area of the wiki contain information for selecting and learning to use one of these popular platforms for agent-based modeling.
- Reviews and comparisons of ABM software platforms.
- Software_templates: 16 working models that start extremely simple and sequentially add common features such as space objects, graphs, probes, random number distributions, and file input and output. The models are implemented in MASON, NetLogo, Repast, and Java and Objective-C Swarm. These template codes can be used to compare platforms and to get started using them.
- Information on integrated development environments including specific instructions for using the Eclipse IDE with MASON, Repast, and Java Swarm.
Wiki renovation
This wiki is undergoing a major renovation to better reflect Swarm Development Group's overall mission of supporting agent-based modeling in general, as well as maintaining Swarm. This home page now has separate boxes for news, ABM resources, Swarm, and SDG. With your help, we will be building up the ABM resources to become a home for all agent-based modelers, no matter what platform they use. If you find bad links, mistakes, etc., please contact us.
A-globe: A new open-source tool for agent-based modeling
The Agent Technology Group, Czech Technical University, announces A-globe, a JAVA multi-agent platform designed for testing experimental scenarios featuring agent positions and communication inaccessibility. The A-globe home page is http://agents.felk.cvut.cz/aglobe .Major redesign of SDG wiki
The Swarm area of the wiki was just re-organized so all its content falls in one of 3 categories, each with its own main page: software, documentation and support, and applications (including user-contributed code that supplements Swarm).
SwarmFest 2005 photos
The 2005 SwarmFest is over, thanks to all the participants! Please have a look at the photo coverage of the meeting. Terna
SwarmFest 2005 tutorial and program
The tutorial and conference program are now online.
Known bugs and workarounds for Swarm 2.2
A bug in the getMin and getMax method of Swarm's Averager class was recently discovered. A description and fixes are on the stable release page.
Objective C swarmapps updated for 2.2
Thanks to Paul Johnson there is a new package of applications for Swarm-2.2, particularly for Objective C. For more details see the applications page.
Swarm 2.2: Our new stable release
Swarm Development Group announces the release of Swarm 2.2 as the new stable release. The many development snapshots have been consolidated into a single set of code for all the available platforms. Thanks to Marcus Daniels for preparing the release, and all of you who have helped develop and test snapshots on various platforms.
- Source code, plus binaries for Windows, Fedora, and Mac OS X are available at the stable release page.
- See the documentation page for the Swarm 2.2 documentation set.
- Example applications are being updated and maintained by Paul Johnson. These currently include well-known models such as heatbugs, mousetrap, the Swarm tutorial, arborgames, schelling2, and Conway's game of life. These are currently on the CVS site at Swarm's development home at Savannah: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/swarm/
Not all aspects of the release are completely settled down and we expect some minor changes in how it is distributed for specific platforms. Here is what you can do:
- If you identify problems, post them to the Swarm support email list, and (better yet) try to find solutions and post those, too.
- If you develop binary distributions for new platforms, etc., post them and an announcement on this wiki. (We encourage users to add things to this site! It's easy.)
- Buy an SDG membership so maintenance and development of Swarm can continue.
SwarmFest 2005
- Pietro Terna announces that the official SwarmFest2005 page is on line. Look at the call for papers!
SDG membership
Development of Swarm 2.2 was largely a volunteer effort (by Marcus Daniels, Paul Johnson, Bill Northcott, and many others), but its packaging as a stable release was paid for by Swarm Development Group membership fees. Memberships are the primary resource we have for future maintenance and development.
- Include a group or institutional membership fee in your project budget. Your proposal will not be rejected because you include an SDG membership as software support or license; instead, it will make you look smart and sophisticated. (This is how the release of 2.2 was funded.)
- Low-cost memberships are available for individuals and low-budget projects.
- See the SDG contact page for information.
RPM packages for Fedora Core 3
- Paul Johnson offers RPMs of the Swarm for Fedora Core 2 & 3: http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm. Support for Redhat 5-8 has been terminated and those packages have been removed. We still have access to one RedHat 9 system, but unless we get some requests, we probably won't try to build RPMs for that platform because the version of gcc on that system is quite out of date.
Swarm Packages for MacOS X 10.3 Panther
- Bill Northcott announces that new binaries are available at [1] for running Swarm on MacOS X 10.3 Panther. These packages include everything other than standard Apple software needed to build and run Swarm models on Panther. There are several versions of the gcc compiler provided. One is a bleeding edge version built from the latest code in Apple's opensurce cvs. This compiler includes Fortran, libffi and the GNU Objective-C runtime library. (30 Nov 2004)
Swarm CD for Windows XP
- Pietro Terna announces that at http://eco83.econ.unito.it/swarm/materiale/cd/ you can find 'all what you need' to install Swarm in a Windows XP machine. Look at the readme.txt file. This distribution contains also other useful things. We hope you'll enjoy it. (June 29, 2004)
SwarmFest 2005
- Pietro Terna announces that the first SwarmFest2005 page is on line.
SwarmFest photos from 2001-2004
- Pietro Terna announces that the photos of the 2001, 2002, 2003 Fests are now also availabe at photo.terna.to.it, free of advertising.
- Also the photos of the 2004 SwarmFest are now on line, at photo.terna.to.it/fotoSwarmFest2004/SwarmFest2004.htm. I hope you'll enjoy them, Pietro Terna
SwarmFest 2004
- SwarmFest 2004: This year's SwarmFest was hosted by the UMich CSCS.
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