AGENT-BASED MODEL : Computer Simulation of Citizen Engagement and the Formation of Public Opinion.

First I would like to thank a lot Gert Jan Hofstede, professor of artificial sociality in Wageningen University & Research, for welcoming me in his course on Agent-Based Modelling of Complex Adaptive Systems last month.
This Open Labs Initiative from the European Social Simulation Association, gave me the opportunity to learn how to design computational social simulations efficiently in order to test my hypotheses on “Citizen Engagement in Smart-City”, the topic of my doctorate degree research in urban science.

In my previous studies, I have validated some hypothesis related to opinion : in “DATA SCIENCE: A Ranking Model for Citizen Engagement in Smart-City” I found that the ability to share its opinion in public and the ability to change its opinion in contact to others are correlated, and the citizens feeling the most engaged, tend to share their opinion in public more easily. And the total sources of information to shape an opinion is an important variable to detect the highness of engagement in a population of citizens. In “TWITTER MINING: A Predictive Model for Public Opinion trained on Citizen Engagement in 100 Smart-Cities” I found that opinion mining algorithms combined with natural language processing on tweets, allowed me to build a predictive model for public opinion. This makes it possible to rank cities on their citizen engagement dynamic using common Twitter communication content.