The Chair of Macroeconomics, Ruhr University Bochum announces the SUMMER SCHOOL ON COMPUTATIONAL METHODS AND SIMULATION FOR ECONOMICS. It will take place from June, 6th to June 9th.

It is a week-long full-time course to teaching students how to best exploit agent-based simulation models in Economics for research purposes. The course aims at providing students with both the technical and methodological skills required to successfully apply an agent-based model in a research project, such as a PhD or a paper.

To whom it is addressed
The summer school is addressed to highly motivated graduate students and PhD students as well as researchers interested in computational social sciences and to experienced modellers interested in exploring an alternative modeling tool.

The course provides guidance on all the steps a researcher needs to follow to use an agent-based simulation model.
The course consists in exercises carried out by students under the supervision of the staff alternated with lectures on examples of pieces of research carried out by using agent-based models. Students are encouraged to bring their own project and develop parts of an original simulation model.

What students will learn
Students will learn to use the simulation platform Laboratory for Simulation Development - LSD (www.labsimdev.org). LSD generates very efficient C++-based simulation programs complete with a professional set of interfaces for the development, control and analysis of simulations. Though LSD does not pose constraints on the class and size of models to implement, it is designed to minimize the amount of code required to generate a model and to optimize the performance. It is thus an attractive choice both for first- time modelers willing to experiment with simple models and for large-scale projects seeking high computational performance. Attendance of the course does not require any prior programming or modeling experience.

Teaching staff
The teaching staff is composed by Prof. Marco Valente (University of L’Aquila) and Prof. Tommaso Ciarli (University of Sussex).
Participation fee
The Summer School admission is free of charge. Because of limited available funding, other expenses, such as dinners, travels, accommodation, will not be covered by organisers.

Selection
Selection of applicants will be made on cv, motivation letter (max 2 pages) detailing the interest of the candidate and, if possible, the type of model s/he would be interested in developing. The number of participants is restricted to 20. Application deadline is March, 1st 2017.
Applications should be sent to [email protected]. Later applications will also be evaluated, but only in the case of free posts. Applicants will be notified by e-mail regarding the status of their applications by the end of March, 2017.

Contact
For any further information, please visit http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/mak/lehre/css.html.en or contact Paola D’Orazio at [email protected].