metascape management
founder
Miles Parker is a leader in the development of Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) tools and, more generally, in applying computational approaches to the understanding of complex systems. Miles has over a dozen years of experience developing software and has been developing software for complex systems since 1994 when he developed a prototype framework for the exploration of Cellular Automata in Apple's Dylan language. Miles began his career as an independent developer of database systems for a broad range of customers. Later, he was principal and lead engineer for jRad, a company that developed enterprise database tools for Java, and that was subsequently acquired by Sun Microsystems. In 1997, Miles joined the Brookings Institution where he worked with Joshua Epstein, Robert Axtell and others in developing ABMs of important social and economic systems. While at Brookings, Miles designed Ascape, a powerful and innovative ABM environment. In 2000, he joined BiosGroup, Inc., where he continued to direct the development and refinement of Ascape and to lead software teams in developing groundbreaking complex system models for a variety of government and commercial applications. In February of 2003, NuTech Solutions acquired the software development and delivery operations of BiosGroup, including the Ascape environment. Miles left NuTech in 2006 to do independent consulting and research and to work on Open Source development projects, including an implementation-neutral high level meta-model for agent based models. In late 2006, Miles formed Metascape, LLC as a firm dedicated to software and science for the complexity sciences. In 2009, Miles proposed the Eclipse Agent Modeling Platform, and is now it's project lead.
Miles has authored a number of papers on ABM tools and techniques and was co-author on significant papers including one for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and another recently reviewed in Nature. He has expertise in Java and a number of other languages and environments including C++, C#, Dylan, LISP, Prolog, Pascal and Mathematica; various enterprise tools such as XML, RDBMS, and GIS; and software development techniques such as OOAD, UML, and Aspect-Oriented Programming. He has a particular interest in applying agile software development methodologies to the development of research-oriented software. In addition to complexity science, Miles has a strong interest in related areas of CS research, including evolutionary computation, ant algorithms, fuzzy logic, neural networks, search, and computational complexity. Miles holds a Bachelors Degree in Political Science from the University of Utah and a Masters Degree in Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University.
