The 2011 Initiative for Computational Economics was a two week summer program held July 18-29, 2011 at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.  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 ICE10 students will receive free copies of AMPL, KNITRO, SNOPT, MINOS, FILTER, and PATH. 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, and the University of Wisconsin. We thank them for their generous donations.

We had our first two one-week Institutes in 2005 and 2006, followed by two-week programs in 2007-2011.

Funding for ICE 2011 has been provided through the generous support of the University of Chicago, the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, and the Computation Institute. Administrative support is provided by the Economics Research Center. We thank them for their support.

Thank you, ICE11 participants!