Human Behaviour Modelling for Interactive Social Simulation

Dear Colleagues,

Recent developments in human behaviour modelling have seen the advent of more complex models and architectures, allowing new applications. The focus has shifted from simple models of reactive behaviour and strong rationality hypotheses, towards complex cognitive architectures taking into account the influence of many human factors, from emotions or personality to social attachment and cognitive biases. At the same time, tools have evolved to make it ever simpler to program these models and run simulations, even for field experts not trained in computer science. As a result, social simulations can now be used in such various fields as disaster response and management, urban planning, economics and finance, or autonomous car navigation.

From a research point of view, there are many issues that should be investigated. First, It should be explored what level of abstraction to model human behaviour is necessary, depending on the target application. Very simple models such as Schelling’s segregation model have proven sufficient to explain some phenomena, but, in other cases, additional complexity is required. For instance, evacuation models have been significantly improved by taking into account social relationships, attachment, or altruistic behaviours not initially considered in simple particle-like models. Second, it should be examined how to find appropriate data to feed more complex models, when qualitative data (e.g., interviews or surveys) are harder to gather than quantitative data (e.g., statistics). Third, it should be studied how to evaluate or validate such human behaviour models so that the resulting simulation is useful to its target end users. Finally, it is also important to understand how to turn a simulation into an engaging serious game, considering issues such as user enjoyment and interaction methods. Additional issues concern the actual use of such tools by field experts who might be reluctant to new unknown technology when they already have satisfying tools.

This Special Issue aims at providing a collection of high-quality research articles that address broad challenges in theoretical aspects of human behaviour modelling and in the evaluation and validation of such models and their various application fields, such as human–computer interaction, social simulation, serious games. The scope includes theoretical papers and concrete case studies or surveys of existing tools.

Dr. Carole Adam
Guest Editor

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• Human behaviour modelling
• Human factors, emotions, cognition, biases
• Social and cultural issues
• Agent-based social simulation
• Design and evaluation
• Serious games, user engagement, user interaction
• Psychology
• User studies