Events

CUSP Lecture: Simulating History: Agent-based Modeling, Machine Learning, and Spaces of Madness

Speaker: Burcak Ozludil

Location: 370 Jay Street, Room 1201

Date: Monday, March 30, 2026

​Simulating historical spaces allows us to ask and address questions by observing emergent movement in space and interactions between its occupants. In this talk, I will discuss how modeling movement within a nineteenth-century mental hospital can help us gain insight into a world we can no longer observe. The agent-based model employs historical documents, data, and 3D models of the institution to reconstruct medical and daily routines. Mental hospitals present a computational and philosophical challenge because of their highly regulated environment populated by agents with constrained decision-making capabilities. In the absence of comprehensive historical patient data in the mental hospital, I will also present an experiment on using different types of medical diagnosis data to train the simulation through machine learning.


​​​About the Speaker
​Dr. Burcak Ozludil is an architect and architectural historian whose interdisciplinary research examines the intersection of urban/architectural space, human sciences, and the digital tools that facilitate scholarship in these fields. She earned her Ph.D. in Urban Systems jointly from NJIT and Rutgers University. She is currently working on her book project, Madness and Empire: The Ottoman Asylum, 1830-1930. Her work has received support from the Social Science Research Council, the Getty Foundation, and the Turkish Cultural Foundation. Burcak is the co-founder of both the Digital Spatial History Lab at NJIT and SpatioScholar, a platform for temporospatial analysis. She also serves as co-director of the Center for Humanities in Extended Reality (CHXR). She has published and presented widely on the analysis of psychiatric spaces, architectural history, Ottoman imperial hospitals, and Islamic architecture. Currently, Burcak is the Associate Dean of the Albert Dorman Honors College at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).