Location: 2203 SAS Hall, NC State Main Campus

Title: Synthetic Populations, Personas and Agents

Presenter: Georgiy Bobashev, Ph.D.

Abstract: Many experiments and estimate are not feasible or unethical to conduct with real people but possible in silico with synthetic individuals. I will present the construction, and the use of geospatially explicit and statistically accurate person and household data, which allow researchers to study community-and neighborhood-level effects, design and test hypotheses that would not be possible without synthetic data. I will present the workflow for generating spatially explicit household- and individual-level synthetic populations for the United States representing 330 million individuals. Synthetic population could be used to probabilistically link multiple datasets for a specific purpose. There are statistical challenges with calibration and validation of these datasets. Agent-based models use these synthetic populations to study policy implications, disease spread, drug using behaviors, etc. The use of synthetics individuals is now broadly expanding into health, economic, defense and other areas. With the developments of AI, AI agents are taking over certain functions, which creates new challenges in the development, calibration and validation of these synthetic individuals.