Pre-Conference Workshops

Two optional pre-conference workshops will be offered to conference attendees prior to the start of CEF 2013.  Registration for workshops is available online with conference registration.  The fee is $25 for each full-day workshop.  Morning and afternoon coffee breaks are included; attendees will be on their own for lunch. Space is limited, and priority will be given to graduate students and recent PhDs (earned November 1, 2012 or later). Non-students may register but will be waitlisted until after May 1, 2013.  Those who register and cannot be accommodated will be refunded in full. Workshops will be held at the Sheraton Wall Centre.

Monday July 8 -- 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

GPU Computing Tutorial

Presented by Garland Durham, Quantos Analytics, LLC

Link to WORKSHOP PREPARATION MATERIALS

Download COURSE OUTLINE.

This tutorial will provide an introduction to parallel programming using commodity video card (GPU) hardware. GPU hardware can enable speedups on the order of a factor of 100 relative to conventional serial computing for amenable applications, and is readily available at modest cost. The main focus will be on using the CUDA software development kit (SDK) with Nvidia hardware. The tutorial will include examples in C/C++, Matlab and Python. A large part of the tutorial will consist of hands-on exercises illustrating basic ideas central to GPU computing and a selection of advanced topics. The tutorial is intended for people with little or no experience in GPU programming.

Participants should bring laptops. Those with laptops equipped with Nvidia graphics cards may find it useful to install the Nvidia CUDA driver and SDK. See https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads for details. Matlab with the parallel computing toolkit might also be useful. However, I intend to provide access to remote servers with hardware and software already installed and configured. This will provide a uniform environment for all participants to work on the exercises we will undertake together.

Some experience with C programming would be helpful. A very rudimentary knowledge is sufficient (e.g., a few hours working through an online tutorial such as http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/c-tutorial.html, excluding the last several sections covering linked lists, recursion, etc).

Linux, OS X and Windows operating systems are all usable.
 

Tuesday, July 9 -- 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Complex Economic Systems

Presented by Cars Hommes, University of Amsterdam

Cars Hommes will teach a one-day workshop about his new book

"Behavioral rationality and heterogeneous expectations in complex economic systems’’, Cambridge University Press 2013.

Download INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER of book

Download E&F Chaos software

Download Computational Economics 2008 article

Download Workshop Slides: Intro, Lecture I, Lecture II, Lecture III, Lecture IV

Recognizing that the economy is a complex system with boundedly rational interacting agents, the course emphasizes a theory of behavioral rationality and heterogeneous expectations in complex economic systems and confronts the nonlinear dynamic models with empirical stylized facts and laboratory experiments with human subjects. The complexity modeling paradigm has been strongly advocated since the late 1980s by some economists and by multidisciplinary scientists from various fields, such as physics, computer science and biology. More recently the complexity view has also drawn the attention of policy makers, who are faced with complex phenomena, irregular fluctuations and sudden, unpredictable market transitions. The complexity tools – bifurcations, chaos, multiple equilibria – discussed in this course will help students, researchers and policy makers to build more realistic behavioral models with heterogeneous expectations to describe financial market movements and macro-economic fluctuations, in order to better manage crises in a complex global economy.

Contents:

1.      Nonlinear dynamics, bifurcations, chaos and strange attractors;

2.      E&F Chaos software for numerical simulation of nonlinear systems;

3.      Behavioral rationality and heterogeneous expectations;

4.      Asset pricing model with heterogeneous beliefs;

5.      Empirical validation;

6.      Laboratory experiments.

Prof. Cars Hommes obtained his PhD in 1991 from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.  He is professor of Economic Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam and Director of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance (CeNDEF). He has applied nonlinear dynamics and complexity to finance and macroeconomics and is an advisor to the Dutch Central Bank (DNB). Cars Hommes has been an active member of the Society for Computational Economics for many years and has been co--editor of the Journal Economic Dynamics and Control, 2002-2012.

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