nICE Home Page — Ken Judd’s Home Page
Hoover Institution, Stanford CA
July 22 — August 2, 2019
Speakers and Topics
Ken Judd (Hoover), Approximation, dynamic programming, perturbation and projection methods
Carlos Rangel (Penn State), Multiobjective optimization
Philipp Mueller, Multiobjective optimization, numerical differentiation and structural estimation by homotopy continuation
Jose, Blockchain
Vanessa Kumar, Machine learning
Alex Rohrer, Machine learning
Ziyu He, “Approximating the radius of convergence”
Friedrich Lorenz, Numerical integration
Student Activities
Students will not be allowed to be passive listeners at nICE. The goal is that they will leave nICE able to implement the numerical methods presented by the speakers in their own work on their own computers.
Students will be required to write programs related to lecture topics. They can choose from a large list of posted problems, and can use any language they want. (By the way, Excel and Stata are NOT programming langages.) The list of possible tasks will include replication of published papers and evaluation of alternative software. Our goal is to give the students experience with serious programming challenges with help from the speakers.
The concrete objectives are is to identify important basic computational tasks, write reliable code for or evaluate existing code for those tasks, and then post them for public use. Some projects will involve novel methods for solving economic problems, and may lead to publishable papers. The end result will hopefully be a collection of programs and results that the students will find useful in their research.
Student Presentations
There will be opportunities for students to present their work.
Location of Meeting Places at Hoover
The lectures will be in Room 101 in the Lou Henry Hoover Building. That room is about where the big “S” on the map. You should enter from the entrance which is at the “H” next to the “S”.
My office is in Room 334 of the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building. The entrance is at the “t” in Herbert. Go in, go up two floors, and turn left.
Lunch
The campus has many places for lunch. See the webpage Dining at Stanford. Don’t be fooled by the word “Dining”. Here is a map of the places closest to Hoover:
13: GSB cafeteria — large selection, big space, default location for many of us
50: Arrillaga center — smaller selection but perhaps better.
43: Traditional American fare, a natural choice given its location on the athletic portion of campus.
Ray’s Grill: Graduate center with a wide selection of affordable food choices.
Lower left hand corner: Tresidder Student Union. Places like Subway, Panda Express, Starbucks, …
Exercise facilities
Stanford has excellent facilities for exercise. You can purchase daily tickets for all recreational facilities at the price of $10 – this requires proof of affiliation. Students living on-campus get a yellow card proving their affiliation – students living in an AirBnB can ask someone with affiliation to buy the tickets for them.
Logistics
I recommend Airbnb. I may have some dorm rooms for nICE participants but won’t know for a while. I will have past visitors tell you about the range of options for staying near Hoover. Go to the “Housing Options” link below.
There is a good bicycle rental place on campus that everyone uses. See Campus Bikeshop (https://campusbikeshop.com).
Rumor has it that there are good places for hiking, surfing, wind surfing, lying on the beach, etc., nearby. See the “Things to do” link below
Financial Help
I currently have no money to help students attend nICE. I will cover expenses related to the operation of nICE, as well as a few group dinners and a couple of group lunches. I will also cover expenses related to services like Stanford internet and some access to the recreational facilities.
Student eligibility
nICE2019 is the “second semester” of nICE2018.