ACE lecturer's research highlighted across the Atlantic
A recent research article by new ACE lecturer Nick McCullen has been picked up by several online
news organisations after being chosen as a highlighted article in a public understanding press
release by the SIAM journal on applied dynamical systems.
The original press release, titled Multiparameter models of innovation diffusion on complex
networks, was reprinted elsewhere before becoming the subject of a blog post by Dr James Keirstead
of Imperial College London, an expert in Urban Energy systems models.
This lead to Nick and his co-author, Catherine Bale, being interviewed for the Atlantic
Cities on-line magazine, a subsidiary of the much larger print publication, the Atlantic Magazine.
This was then republished in modified form by others, including Government Technology magazine
website.
Nick said “this is a strange case of life imitating art, as the original research was related
to how ideas spread via social networks, and this work has now started spreading by similar routes
to those it describes”.
Nick’s research deals with using computer simulations of mathematical models of the diffusion
of energy efficiency innovations in cities, propagated via communication over real-world social
networks.
“I am interested in how the complex interactions between the various components, such as
buildings, technology, the environment, and people, affect system-scale properties such as the
overall energy consumption of cities.”
To further this work and forge new research collaborations, Nick has organised, and will be
chairing, a mini-symposium on modelling of cities entitled “Urban Dynamics” at the Society for
Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference on applications of dynamical systems in Snowbird,
Utah, USA in May.
