INET Oxford Complexity Economics Researcher Joel Dyer has won the best paper award at the 40th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, for his work on approximate Bayesian inference methods for simulation models.
Joel's paper, in collaboration with Patrick Cannon and Sebastian Schmon, was published in the Fortieth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence in September. It seeks to aid widespread adoption of simulators in real-world modelling and decision-making scenarios, by making approximate Bayesian inference more suitable for predictive simulation models.
Simulation models, in particular agent-based models, are gaining popularity in economics and the social sciences. The considerable flexibility they offer, as well as their capacity to reproduce a variety of empirically observed behaviours of complex systems, give them broad appeal, and the increasing availability of cheap computing power has made their use feasible.
INET Oxford Director of Complexity Economics Professor J. Doyne Farmer said that Joel's research was laying the groundwork for further advances in agent-based modelling.
"Joel's work is at the cutting edge of developing new and better methods for calibrating agent-based models so that they better match real data.
"His models are making it feasible to solve problems that were previously unsolvable, which could cause a major breakthrough in economics" Professor Farmer said.
About the UAI Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence
The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. UAI is supported by the Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).
The conference has been held every year since 1985. The 40th edition was held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, between 15th and 19th July 2024, involving Tutorials, a Main Conference and Workshops.
The main conference featured a program with keynote talks by Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Dominik Janzing, and Vanessa Didelez, as well as tutorials, workshops, selected peer-reviewed papers, and many others. Check out the photo album and twitter channel for photos and others. The conference was co-hosted by the Barcelona School of Economics and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.


