
Tom BriggsGeorge Mason University | GMU · Department of Computational and Data Sciences
Tom Briggs
Industrial/Organizational Psychology; Computational Social Science
About
12
Publications
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Introduction
PhD Candidate in Computational Social Science,
Department of Computational and Data Sciences,
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
Research interests:
(1) Computational social science applied to leadership, employee behavior and performance, and to the psychological theories addressing workplace behavior and outcomes.
(2) Mass violence, active shooters, mass shootings, including the spread of mass violence and its antecedents.
Additional affiliations
July 2020 - present
July 2020 - present
July 2020 - present
Education
August 2014 - May 2020
August 2007 - May 2009
Publications
Publications (12)
National survey of urban residents to assess evacuation intentions following a dirty bomb or during an influenza pandemic.
Mass shootings unfold quickly and are rarely foreseen by victims. Increasingly, training is provided to increase chances of surviving active shooter scenarios, usually emphasizing “Run, Hide, Fight.” Evidence from prior mass shootings suggests that casualties may be limited should the shooter encounter unarmed resistance prior to the arrival of law...
Few computational network models contrasting formal organization and informal networks have been published. A generalized organizational agent-based model (ABM) containing both formal organizational hierarchy and informal social networks was developed to simulate organizational processes that occur over both formal network ties and informal network...
Mass violence is empirically rare. Studying mass violence presents numerous meth-odological challenges. The complex nature of mass violence events, which may have germinated in years prior, make attempts to use conventional research methods problematic. Complexity science and the interdisciplinary field of computational social science offer new sci...
Mass shootings unfold quickly and are rarely foreseen by victims. Increasingly, training is provided to ostensibly increase chances of surviving active shooter scenarios, usually emphasizing “run, hide, fight.” Evidence from prior mass shootings suggests that casualties may be limited, should the shooter encounter unarmed resistance. An agent-based...
Brief essay on why it takes more than just "big data" to understand complex social systems, originally appeared at: http://twbriggs.com/index.php/2018/11/14/essay-complex-social-systems-youll-need-more-than-just-big-data/
Employees may be co-located with their manager or they may be separated by distances ranging from a short walk to across oceans, with many gradations in between. Some distances, such as those between floors of an office building, are physically short but may be psychologically quite far. Using a spatial ABM, the current project examines the manager...
Little previous effort exists to implement personality variables in agent decision or behavioral rules in agent-based modeling (ABM). Using existing personality psychology literature, an ABM was constructed to explore personality traits and situational strength.
The objective of the study was to model urban evacuation into surrounding communities after the detonation of an improvised nuclear device (IND) to assist rural and suburban planners in understanding and effectively planning to address the effects of population surges.
Researchers developed parameters for how far evacuees would travel to escape dis...
It's often assumed that high-cost health insurance plans--sometimes called "Cadillac" plans--provide rich benefits to plan subscribers. Health reform provisions that treat these plans like luxuries may be misguided. Only 3.7 percent of variation in the cost of family coverage can be explained by benefit design (actuarial value). Benefit design plus...
The potential evacuation of urban citizens to surrounding rural areas following a disaster or public health emergency is a significant preparedness concern. Rural planners have little urban evacuation information on which to base rural preparedness planning efforts. This presentation offers a method and tool for predicting the evacuation from an ur...
Projects
Projects (6)
The project consists of three parts: the planning tool, the planning guide and additional resources. To aid preparedness planning, the online, map-based Urban to Rural Evacuation Planning Tool provides a model to help estimate the number of evacuees that may arrive in a county following a disaster in a nearby city. The Rural Preparedness Planning Guide supplements this tool by offering recommendations for pre-event, event and post-event planning. Additionally, policy analysis briefs and webcasts provide background information on urban-to-rural evacuation, citing data collected from interviews with experts and a national survey of urban residents to assess evacuation intentions.
https://www.norc.org/Research/Projects/Pages/emergency-preparedness-planning-modeling-the-impact-of-urban-evacuation-on-surrounding-and-rural-communities.aspx
http://apps.cei.psu.edu/evac/about/index.html
Complexity science and the interdisciplinary field of computational social science offer new scientific paradigms and computational tools well suited to the study of complex and dynamic phenomena like mass violence.
Develop a computational agent-based model (ABM) to simulate work and information flow over both formal, hierarchical networks and informal networks that cross organizational boundaries.