From COVID to Commuting – Fred Shone on Population Activity Modeller (PAM)

#11: Fred Shone joins Arfon and Abby to discuss his journey from engineer to economist to data scientist to PhD student, the development of Population Activity Model (PAM) including the evolution from pandemic modeling to broader population activity insights.

Fred is a PhD student at the UCL Behaviour and Infrastructure Group (BIG). He built PAM when he was technical lead for the City Modelling Lab at Arup.

You can follow Fred on GitHub @fredshone and check out his website https://fredshone.github.io.

Episode Highlights

• [00:01:30] Fred Shone's Background - Fred Shone discusses his journey from civil engineering to economics and data science, leading to his PhD studies.
• [00:02:24] Origin of PAM - Fred talks about the creation of PAM, originally the Pandemic Activity Modifier, and its evolution to Population Activity Modeller.
• [00:04:31] Purpose and Application of PAM - Fred explains how PAM was used during the COVID-19 pandemic to model and update transport models quickly.
• [00:05:39] Behavioral Modeling Insights - Discussion on the necessity of understanding human behavior for policy and business decisions.
• [00:07:30] Agent-Based Modeling - Fred elaborates on the benefits and challenges of modeling specific individuals in PAM.
• [00:13:00] Using PAM in PhD Research - Fred mentions how he continues to use PAM for his current research.
• [00:14:24] Target Audience for PAM - Discussion on the various fields interested in PAM, including transport, energy, and epidemiology.
• [00:16:08] Internal and External Use of PAM - Fred talks about how Arup and external contributors use and contribute to PAM.
• [00:19:16] Open Source Software in Industry - The challenges and benefits of publishing open source software from an industry perspective.

Links

• JOSS paper: https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.06097
• PAM repository: https://github.com/arup-group/pam
• Arup: https://www.arup.com/
• Fred on GitHub: https://github.com/fredshone
• Fred’s website: https://fredshone.github.io/
• The Journal of Open Source Software (Twitter/X, blog)
• @arfon on (fosstodon, Linkedin, GitHub, website)
• @abbycabs on (Twitter/X, hachyderm, bsky, Linkedin, GitHub, website)
• Donate to JOSS

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