Collaborative Research: Modeling the Social Actor

这项研究是基于一个全面的多尺度，多学科的方法来研究复杂的信息时代的问题，涉及到人的组合和他们使用的信息和通信技术。这项研究扩展了通过先前NSF资助的研究开发的社会行为者的工作。社会行动者是一种根据经验得出的人+信息和通信技术的模式。为了使这个模型可用于更广泛的研究人员和政策制定者社区，他们需要强大的模型，以及将人和他们的技术混为一谈的属性和行为的可靠度量，需要对社会参与者进行某种形式化。将使用从体制理论中得出的衡量标准，制定基于社会行为者概念的适当衡量标准，并将其与认知理解和协作决策的正式模型和理论联系起来，为推理信息和通信技术注入的环境奠定更好的基础。一个理论支持，经验接地，社会演员模型，然后将被用来模拟动态代理，与兰德公司的研究人员合作开发的方案。实证工作将涉及使用基于代理的系统（ABS）在组织和机构环境中将社会行为者建模为人+ IC。基于代理的建模允许研究人员检查复杂的自适应系统与复杂的计算模型，整合经验研究和正式建模。这些系统帮助研究人员和政策制定者探索参与合作和竞争的社会单位的复杂互动的动态问题。

This research is based on a comprehensive multi-scaled, multi-disciplinary approach to study complex information age issues that involve the combination of people and the information and communication technologies they use. This study extends work on social actors, developed through prior NSF-funded research. The social actor is an empirically derived model of people+ information and communication technologies (ICTs). To make this model useable for a wider community of researchers and policy- makers, who need robust models with solid measures of attributes and behaviors that conflate people and their technologies, some formalization of the social actor is required. Using metrics derived from institutional theory, appropriate measures based on social actor concepts will be developed and related to formal models and theories of cognitive understanding and collaborative decision making to establish a better basis for reasoning about ICT-infused environments. A theoretically supported, empirically grounded, social actor model will then be used to simulate dynamic agents, with scenarios developed in collaboration with RAND organization researchers. The empirical work will involve modeling social actors as people + IC in organizational and institutional settings using agent-based systems (ABS). Agent-based modeling allows a researcher to examine complex adaptive systems with sophisticated computational models that integrate empirical research and formal modeling. These systems help researchers and policy-makers explore the dynamic issues that attend the complex interactions of collaborative and competitive social units.