2010

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Program Announcement

Program Announcement 2010

Students

• Randy Casstevens, Computational Social Science, George Mason University (rcasstev@gmu.edu)
• Vessela Daskalova, Economics, U. of London (v.daskalova@qmul.ac.uk)
• Ozge Kalkan Dilaver, Economics and Management Science, Lancaster University (o.dilaverkalkan@lancs.ac.uk)
• David Hendry, Political Science, U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (hendry2@illinois.edu)
• Coco Krumme, Media Lab, MIT (kak@mit.edu)
• Davide Marchiori, Economics and Management, U. of Trento (marchiorid@yahoo.it)
• Miriam Rehm, Economics, New School for Social Research (miriam.rehm@gmx.at)
• Jennifer Trueblood, Cognitive Science, Indiana U. (jstruebl@indiana.edu)
• Olivia Woolley, Engineering and Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University (o-woolley@northwesern.edu)
• Matt Zimmerman, Ecology, U. of California Davis (mrz1@ucdavis.edu)

Schedule

Schedule 2010

Faculty

• Willemien Kets, Economics, SFI.
• John H. Miller (co- director), Economics, Carnegie Mellon University and SFI.
• Scott E. Page (co-director), Economics, U. of Michigan and SFI.
• Jon Wilkins, Theoretical Biology, SFI.

Homework

Homework Problem 2010

Student Projects

Each student began a research project during the two-week workshop. Below are brief descriptions of these various projects. These projects will form the basis for dissertation chapters and/or journal articles.

Randy Casstevens, Computational Social Science, George Mason University (rcasstev@gmu.edu)
Randy is exploring the process of innovation in software development. He compares patterns of human-problem solving, as measured by a public MATLAB Programming Contest, and those that arise via evolutionary computation. The MATLAB contest explored programs that could solve a non-trivial peg solitaire game, and it had over 3000 submissions from over 100 programmers. The evolutionary computation problem was the Artificial Ant Problem from the genetic programming community. Both systems display punctuated equilibria in terms of overall performance metrics, had new efforts exploiting recently introduced innovations, and have some interesting similarities concerning measures of program complexity. One important parameter linked to the growth of program complexity is the amount of parsimony pressure applied to the evolving programs.