The 2008 Institute on Computational Economics is a two week summer program held July 28 - August 8, 2008 at the University of Chicago.  We are pleased to announce that this year we have acquired state-of-the-art software for participants to use  for free for the duration of their graduate studies, and that the program puts much effort on helping participants apply this software and the techniques they learn at ICE to actual research economics problems.

ICE serves as a focal point for promoting and disseminating cutting-edge methods in computational science useful in the solution and empirical estimation of economic models. Currently there is no clearing house for disseminating developments in computational science to economists, and the interaction between economics and computational science is poorly developed. ICE will serve to stimulate the exchange of knowledge and the development of new computational tools to solve economic policy questions. The goal is to create an institute that will build a community of scholars around the world that will interact on an ongoing basis. Such interactions are at the heart of successful scientific research.

Knowing computational methods is useless information if one does not have access to reliable software that implements those methods. Therefore, we are happy to announce that ICE08 students will receive free copies of AMPL, KNITRO, SNOPT, MINOS, FILTER, PATH, and the Tomlab Optimization Environment in Matlab. These will all be complete versions, not just the student versions. The licenses for each of these solvers will be free to participant throughout their graduate student career. This is made possible by the support of ICE by AMPL, Ziena, the Stanford Systems Optimization Laboratory, the University of Dundee, the University of Wisconsin, and Tomlab Optimization. We thank them for their generous donations.

We had our first two one-week Institutes in 2005 and 2006, followed by a two-week program in 2007. The 2008 program was developed after receiving feedback and suggestions from participants in earlier years, and we thank them for their help and support.

Funding for ICE 2008 has been provided solely through a generous grant from the Office of the Vice President of Research at the University of Chicago and a grant from the Computation Institute. Administrative support is provided by the Economics Research Center. We thank them for their support.

James J. Heckman

Director of the Economics Research Center, University of Chicago

Instructions for downloading the software were sent out in email from Che-Lin Su. Please contact him if you need information or assistance.

Please note: all sessions will be held in room C-10 at the Graduate School of Business.