Previous Editions

The first edition of the workshop (BWSS 2008) occurred as a co-located event with SBIA 2008 – Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, in Salvador, Brazil (http://ppginf.ucpel.tche.br/bwss2008/).
The goal of the first edition was to put together Brazilian researchers working on the themes of the event, in an attempt to expose the works being developed in the area in Brazil. However, the workshop also attracted the participation of foreign researchers, in particular, Prof. Dr. Helder Coelho (University of Lisbon, Portugal) and Prof. Dr. Cristiano Castelfranchi (ISTC - Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, CNR, Rome, Italy).
During the event, Brazilian and Portuguese researchers agreed on the importance of the continuity of the workshop, to leverage the cooperation between the two countries, and a decision was taken that future editions of the workshop would happen in Brazil in even numbered years, and in Portugal, in odd numbered years.

So, in 2009, the workshop happened co-located with EPIA 2009 – Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, in the city of Aveiro, Portugal, with the title SSM – Social Simulation and Modelling (http://epia2009.web.ua.pt/ssm/). A selection of presented works was published in the proceedings of the main event, in the Springer series Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence.

BWSS 2010 (http://www.ncc.furg.br/bwss2010), which happened as an event co-located with the SBIA/SBRN Joint Conference (http://www.jointconference.fei.edu.br) in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, was the third event in the series. The Program Committee was enhanced with the participation of important researchers in the area, belonging to different countries (Germany, Brazil, UK, Spain, USA, France, Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, among others). BWSS 2010 received the financial support from CNPq, CAPES and FAPESP.

Like two years before, in 2011 the SSM workshop was organized by Portuguese and Brazilian researchers and was co-located with the Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2011 -http://epia2011.appia.pt/ssm.aspx) that took place in Lisbon, Portugal. A very participated workshop supported the idea that the workshop series should continue in subsequent years. Selected works were again published in the proceedings of the main event, in the Springer series Lecture Notes on Artificial intelligence.

In BWSS 2012 (http://bwss2012.c3.furg.br), besides the technical session, two international speakers were invited, Prof. Dr. Nigel Gilbert (Director, CRESS – Center for Research in Social Simulation, University of Surrey, UK) and Prof. Dr. Cristiano Castelfranchi, which came to BWSS 2010 not only for the invited talks, but also to participate in meetings with Brazilian and Portuguese researchers.
Those meetings, which were coordinated by Prof. Dr. Jaime Sichman, with the participation of Prof. Dr. Helder Coelho, allowed for the mapping of the situation of the research on social simulation in Brazil, and a perspective view of its status with respect to the state of the art.
Extended version of the two best papers of BWSS 2010, selected by the Program Committee, were published in the Springer journal JBCS (Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society). Also, a set of extended versions of the papers was published by IEEE under the title “Advances in Social Simulation, Post-Proceedings of the Brazilian Workshop on Social Simulation”. That publication involved 19 papers, including the paper of one of the invited talks.
BWSS 2012 was, thus, the fifth event in the series, the third in Brazil. The goal was to bring to Brazil high-quality works, allowing the Brazilian researchers to get in contact with the state of the art in Social Simulation.
Two speakers were invited to address the audience, Prof. Dr. Alan Kirman (GREQAM, AMU and EHESS Marseille, France) and Dr. Armando Geller (Group W and George Mason University, USA). The two speakers also participated in a panel to be coordinated by Prof. Dr. Helder Coelho, to discuss their views about the future of the area, especially in its connection to the Sciences of Complexity, through agents and Artificial Intelligence.