Author Archives: Jase Thompson

More policies can be modelled than we’re being told – So why aren’t we doing it? Humans (and animals) are especially good at learning from simple reward-punishment scenarios. Act -> Receive reward -> Do it again. I’m greatly over-simplifying but you know what I mean. What we are talking about here is operant conditioning, whichContinue reading “School closures, masks and the COVID-Safe App”

This is a summary of a paper released in early 2020 in the Journal, Ergonomics, which you can read and download for free, here. Around the world, road crashes kill 1.35 million people per year and injure up to 50 million more. Road trauma is now the world’s 5th leading cause of death and disabilityContinue reading “The perils of perfect performance; considering the effects of introducing autonomous vehicles on rates of car vs cyclist conflict”

Australia is in a rapidly evolving period, with State and Federal Governments all moving to implement or maintain a variety of policy measures designed to protect health, the economy, or arguably both in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Where previously Governments across the nation were in relative lock-step, the last week has seen cracks appearingContinue reading “Track and Trace, Pros and Cons”

The estimated likelihood of eliminating the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Australia and New Zealand under current public health policy settings On April 10th, I wrote about issues we had observed in public policy discussions regarding the possibility of eliminating COVID-19 from Australia. We asked (because we were perplexed), “Why is elimination of COVID-19 in Australia apparentlyContinue reading “Knife’s edge.”

Recent days have witnessed the apparent success of Australia’s efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 through mass public health measures including Social Distancing, Quarantine, banning of public gatherings, travel and economic restrictions. These measures and their timing are being wonderfully catalogued and captured by Behrooz Hassani and his colleague Yuri Song here. As canContinue reading “Why is elimination of COVID-19 in Australia apparently off the table?”

What you see below is a summary of the model – For more detailed information, please see the ODD Documents in the Git Repository, here. Below we begin to document the background to the model using guidelines from the Overview, Design concepts and Details (ODD) protocol for describing Individual and Agent-BasedModels (ABMs). To save searchingContinue reading “Documentation for the COVID-19 ABM”

When you’re travelling, do you ever get the feeling that one city reminds you of another? Yep, so do we. We took that feeling into the lab to show how AI and big data can help us understand the effect of urban design on road injury across the globe. Most of us think almost nothingContinue reading “Injured by design: How city designs set the scene for road traffic injuries”

This model is being developed by researchers at the Transport, Health and Urban Design Research Hub at the University of Melbourne in response to the current COVID-19 outbreak in Australia. Its purpose is to analyse and assist with social policy-responses to limit the health and economic harm associated with the pandemic. This includes policies appropriateContinue reading “An Agent-Based Model for dynamic policy analysis and planning for COVID-19 in Australia”

The following is an exerpt from an upcoming chapter on the use of Agent-Based Models for the study of socio-technical systems. Procedure and advice The procedure set out below is directed toward the researcher who has not previously tackled the development of an ABM. It is therefore focused on advice on how to think aboutContinue reading “Procedures and Advice for Agent-Based Model Implementation”

The following is an exerpt from an upcoming chapter on the use of Agent-Based Modeling in socio-technical systems to be released in June 2020. To help bring the approach to life, let’s practice ‘thinking in ABM’. First, take a moment to imagine you hold in your hand a set of agents that represent a populationContinue reading “Thinking ABM-style”