John Paul Gonzales

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I'm John Paul Gonzales, SFI Education and Outreach.

Life

Born and raised in Santa Fe.

At SFI I've primarily been working with and learning from SFI Postdoc Bela Nagy on his evolution of technology studies. I'm also involved with SFI's Project GUTS, where I disseminate whatever complex systems science and computational research I learn here to mid school students throughout the state, and the Learn@SFI team, which crafts new and exciting ways to promote science education through the study of complex systems. My other primary work is with the Supercomputing Challenge, a state-wide scientific computational research program that teaches the basics of programing and computer modeling through project-based learning -- with a little bit of competition thrown in for good measure.

Other work/groups I'm involved with include the Santa Fe Complex, a community arts and sciences outreach organization.

In my free time, I work the land on my family's farm (10 generations!) on the outskirts of Santa Fe in the small village of La Cienega. I'm interested and active in land use and water use issues within my community, where we seek to preserve the rural integrity and viability of our historic water systems and traditional way of life. I've been a board member of the La Cienega Valley Association.

I can be reached at my first two initials (JP) at-- sntafe -dot- edu

Tour Guide

Feel free to ask me if you have questions about food and dining, after-hours events or other things to do in the Santa Fe and greater New Mexico region. I love playing tour guide and introducing visitors to Santa Fe.

When I'm not around SFI I can be found at the Santa Fe Complex having fun with the things and people found there.

Answers to Questions

1. My interests are pretty broad, and include everything studied at SFI.

2. My primary competency is agent based modeling, especially in NetLogo and the related languages. I'm experienced in using the integrated GIS functionality of NetLogo to construct agent-based models on real world data, and I know the ins and outs of USGS Seamless dataservers for pulling in most everything relating to geography, demographics and physical infrastructure that is available through U.S. government surveys. I'm also fairly competent in GlobalMapper and ArcGIS for manipulating GIS information.

I've also been around SFI for a while, so I'm pretty well up to speed on current (~3 years) work that is going on here.

3. My main goal is to sit in the back of the classroom during lecture (when I have the time) and learn as much about every subject I possibly can.

4. I'm very interested in exploring economic network models, specifically dynamic "Foodweb"-type theoretical models. Also, I've got a great interest in local and traditional agricultural economies, and have several datasets (as well as some work from previous years) to explore.

BRAINSTORM EDIT: I'd like to see if we can put together a project sort of like the how the Independent Movie Data Base contributed to network studies in describing Hollywood, but for musical artists. It seems that there's a lot of overlap and collaboration within music, but to my knowledge not much has been done to describe the network topology of the musical world. Should be a fun exercise at the least. Check out http://www.discogs.com/data/ for datasets...