April 18, 2024

Research Seminar Brendan Wallace – April 23

Our spring quarter seminar series continues with QERM PhD student Brendan Wallace presenting on April 23 in Gould Hall 440 from 12:30-1:30pm. This is an in-person seminar.

Presenter:

Brendan Wallace, Quantitative Ecology & Resource Management, College of the Environment

Title:

Desire paths: theory and modeling

Abstract:

Desire paths (aka game trails) form when people or animals walk along a path through rough terrain or vegetation and flatten it down, making it easier for subsequent travelers to follow the same path. This process can be thought of as a temporally distributed collective behavior which embeds navigational knowledge into the landscape. At the same time, this process of path formation isn’t fully cooperative: each person walks in a way that optimizes their own travel costs and comfort; and by all doing so, they together negotiate an allocation of a scarce infrastructure resource (that is, where to place the path) in a way that is efficient and/or stable.

This talk will overview some methodology and rationale of how to model a multi-agent complex system, and some interesting and surprising theoretical background of efficient transportation networks. It will discuss an earlier and seminal modeling approach, open questions, and the current approach with some early results and implications.

Bio:

Brendan is a PhD student in the QERM program at the University of Washington. He has a BS and MS in applied math, and previously worked for Google maps on the road traffic team working on predicting road speeds and travel times. He’s interested in using a multi-disciplinary approach to modeling complex systems, in particular those related to movement ecology and crossovers between ecological and human/urban systems.