Kieran Alden, postdoc in the Kreft Lab, has just returned from Toronto where he attended the Summer Simulation Multi-Conference 2013, organised by the Society for Modelling and Simulation International. As part of this meeting, Kieran co-chaired a satellite workshop, addressing Confidence in Simulations for Science, alongside Professor Jon Timmis, Dr Mark Read, and Dr Paul Andrews, all of the University of York's York Computational Immunology Lab
This workshop was organised to discuss the issue of establishing whether scientific simulation outputs are truly representative of the systems that they simulate. This is relevant not only to computational immunology and microbiology, but to the simulation of biological, sociological, ecological and economic systems (and potentially many more). The workshop was well attended, with discussions focussing on quantification of confidence in simulation, stakeholder engagement, the purpose of simulation, tools to use to address the issue of confidence in a model, model composition, and reproducibility of results and models. Rather than a tutorial, the workshop was discussion-based, with the chairs suggesting areas of key concern for discussion. The slides and notes taken at this meeting will be available shortly
As all attendees found the afternoon workshop very useful, there are plans to organise a follow up at a later date. Details will be published at a later date.
