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Reflecting on 2024 with The Storymodelers

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Updated: 7 days ago

Often we forget to celebrate our wins—big and small—and make little how hard we worked to make them happen. As we step into 2025, The Storymodelers is reflecting on some of the incredible achievements from the past year that have propelled our work forward. Here are just a few highlights from 2024

 

✅ Securing Major Grants: Storymodelers and their collaborators around the world were awarded two prestigious Minerva Research Initiative grants totaling over $3 million! These projects focus on exciting basic social science research topics:

  • UN-RESILIENCE: Harnessing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to study societal collapse and resilience worldwide.

  • BEYOND THE Clock: Investigating how cultural conceptions of time influence military strategy through innovative arts-based methodologies. 

See for more information about the grants and our research. https://shorturl.at/BSvoh

 

✅ Student Success:

  • Jhon Botello was invited to participate in a UC Berkeley presentation on digital history to showcase his data analysis of their census data. https://shorturl.at/mc7om

  • Mel Miller-Felton traveled to South Africa to conduct fieldwork in a township outside of Cape Town as part of a Minerva Research Initiative project funded by AFOSR titled “What's Missing? Innovating interdisciplinary methods for hard-to-reach environments.” She collected photo and narrative data about women’s safety and resilience in South Africa. https://shorturl.at/0nTuI

  • Joseph Martinez traveled to Bogota, Colombia, with former storymodeler, Mackenzie Clark, to participate in a Santa Fe Institute workshop on complexity. https://shorturl.at/cEF5O

  • Mel Miller-Felton advanced in her PhD program after passing her candidacy exam at ODU's Graduate Program in International Studies.

  • Jhon Botello was invited to Paris, France, to present at the “Digital Methods for the Study of Mobilities” workshop, held June 25-26, 2024, at INALCO in Paris, France. https://shorturl.at/dOZux

  • Joseph Martinez spent one month at the University of Agder in Norway to extend our collaboration with colleagues in the history and AI departments. https://shorturl.at/MosK9

  • Daniel Bolivar completed his master’s thesis! He now holds a master’s in data analytics from Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia.  https://shorturl.at/RXYRw

  • Joseph Martinez, one of the first Storymodelers research assistants, graduated with a master’s degree from the modeling and simulation program in the ECE department at ODU.


✅ New Storymodelers:

  • Lawrence Obiuwevwi joined the Storymodelers in the spring of 2024 as a PhD student in Computer Science at ODU. Lawrence hails from Nigeria and has a bachelor’s in electrical engineering.

  • We hosted two undergraduate interns over the summer as part of the NSF REU program in Computer Science at ODU to understand dis- and misinformation. One intern, Jessica Melton, has continued with us into 2025.

  • Two interns from the ODU Philosophy Department joined our Beyond the Clock project funded through the ODU Mellon Foundation Internship and Co-op program for Humanities Students.

  • Rafael Martínez, Valencia Estor, Daniela Nuñez, and Alexander Rangel at Uninorte, Colombia, joined the team in 2024


✅ Presentations & Publications: (asterisks mark student co-authors)

  • Martínez, Joseph, Brian Llinas*, Jhon G. Botello*, Jose J. Padilla, and Erika Frydenlund. (December 15–18, 2024). “Enhancing GPT-3.5’s Proficiency in NetLogo Through Few-Shot Prompting and Retrieval-Augmented Generation.” Proceedings of the 2024 Winter Simulation Conference. Orlando, Florida.

  • Botello, Jhon G*., Katherine Palacio, Erika Frydenlund, Humerto Llinás, and José Padilla. (2024). “Adapting and Validating a Survey to Assess Host Communities Support for Migration.” Social Indicators Research. https://shorturl.at/obkf8

  • Frydenlund, Erika, Joseph Martínez*, Jose J. Padilla, Katherine Palacio, and David Shuttleworth*. (2024). “Modeler in a Box: How Can Large Language Models Aid in the Simulation Modeling Process?” SIMULATION. 2024;0(0). https://shorturl.at/l3JDF

  • Rechowicz, K.J., Irwin T. (2024), “Enhancing Defense Manufacturing Readiness: A Mission Engineering Approach.” Presented at the 2024 Defense Manufacturing Conference, December 2-5, 2024, Austin, TX.

  • Romero, Liss D., Jose J. Padilla, Katherine Palacio, and Erika Frydenlund. (2024). “Mapping cooperation: insights into Colombia's humanitarian response to migration from Venezuela.” Frontiers in Human Dynamics: Dynamics of Migration and (Im) Mobility. https://shorturl.at/y4Vdu

  • Botello, J. G., Frew, L., Padilla, J. J., & Weigle, M. C. (December 15–18, 2024). Exploring Large Language Models for Analyzing Changes in Web Archive Content: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Approach. Proceedings of the 9th Computational Archival Science (CAS) Workshop, Washington, DC. https://tinyurl.com/mp2bbvby


We look forward to all the successes and contributions our international team will make in 2025. Go Storymodelers!!! 🫶 


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