Organizers: Bogumił Kamiński & Przemysław Szufel

Julia is a new Open Source language designed for science and numerical computing. Since 1.0 version release in August 2018, an exponential growth of language popularity has been observed and the language is in the top-20 programming languages. Julia takes “walks like Python, runs like C” approach and offers a syntax similar to Matlab and Python yet with speed of C++. This makes it a perfect tool for scientific computing and running large scale simulation.

The goal of this workshop is to help social scientists to leverage the power of Julia language to build and run large scale agent‐based simulation models with a special focus on modeling social interactions on networks more efficiently. The workshop is divided into four parts. We will start with an introductory information about the Julia language. Next we will present Agents.jl (https://github.com/JuliaDynamics/Agents.jl), a framework dedicated to building ABM simulations in Julia. The introductory session will be followed by a practical hands-on workshop.  Finally, we will discuss how to run simulation experiments on a massively parallelized infrastructure.  Please note that we will distribute to the registered participants the information about how they should configure their computers before the online event.

Here is a detailed plan for the workshop:

• Part one: First steps with the Julia language (introduction to the language aimed at beginners); instructor: Bogumił Kamiński
• Part two: Meet Agents.jl (learning the basics of development of agent-based models using Agents.jl in the Julia language); instructors: George Datseris, Timothy DuBois
• Part three: Use Agents.jl (interactive session: development of a sample agent-based model using Agents.jl by the participants); instructors: George Datseris, Timothy DuBois
• Part four: Agent-based modeling at scale (presentation of example large scale agent-based models created using the Julia language); instructor: Przemysław Szufel