# Acknowledgments

SynthPopCan began from work undertaken in connection with the SynthEco proposal
and its broader research vision for synthetic populations embedded in social,
geographic, and environmental context.

That earlier project shaped the questions this repository continues to pursue:
how to build synthetic populations from Canadian data sources, how to preserve
household and person relationships, how to connect synthetic populations to
place, and how to make the resulting tools useful for researchers outside a
single technical specialty.

I especially acknowledge
[Laurette Dubé](https://www.mcgill.ca/desautels/laurette-dube)
(<laurette.dube@mcgill.ca>) and Shawn Brown
for their leadership in that proposal and for the intellectual context in which
this work began. SynthPopCan is not the same project, and it is currently a
narrower research software effort focused on population synthesis. It should be
understood as a spiritual and academic successor to that earlier work.

I also want to acknowledge the
[Pritchard and Miller (2012) population-synthesis paper](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-011-9367-4)
and the associated legacy code. That work has been an important algorithmic
reference for this project, especially for thinking about IPF, sparse/list-based
representations, fitted expansion weights, and the practical difficulty of
coordinating household and person controls. The legacy code is not treated here
as a direct implementation target, but it remains a valuable reference design
and part of the academic lineage behind SynthPopCan.

Any mistakes, limitations, or design choices in SynthPopCan are my own.