SBP-BRIMS 2019 Tutorial: An Introduction to Mesa

(Tuesday July 09 at 12:00pm)

Jacqueline Kazil

Description: In this tutorial, you will learn how to get up and running in Mesa, an agent-based modeling library in Python 3+. This tutorial will cover setting up a sample model following the Mesa tutorial documentation and running it from the command line launching a browser as well as a jupyter notebook. We will also cover a variety of settings and applications with hands on exercises including how to do parameter sweeps as well how to set up and run someone else’s models. Lastly, we will go over extension libraries that others have built such as Mesa-Geo and Multi-level Mesa, time permitting.

Expected audience: Members of the audience are expected to have little to no background Python. Pre-work will be sent out to try to expedite the setup process and allow users to identify an installation permissions issues that they may be having on their machines. Users can also ask for help with set up before the day of the tutorial on the Project Mesa user group listserv.

Speaker:
Jackie is the co-author of Mesa, a Python-based agent-based modeling library, and sits on the Board of the Python Software Foundation. Her day job is working at Capital One. In her spare time she works on her Ph.D in Computational Social Science at George Mason University. Prior to Capital One she co-founded 18F, was a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and has worked at The Washington Post. She is the co-author of the O’Reilly book, Data Wrangling with Python, a Python book for beginners working with data. She also has taught a variety of tutorials and bootcamps at conferences and meetups. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, daughter, and dog.

Note: An additional instructor or two maybe added to help troubleshoot issues depending on the size of the classroom.

Contact: Email = JackieKazil@gmail.com