News Items for
Agent-Based Computational Economics (ACE)
December 2002
- Prepared by:
-
Leigh Tesfatsion
- Department of Economics
- Iowa State University
- Ames, Iowa 50011-1070
- http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/
-
tesfatsi@iastate.edu
- ACE Website Home Page:
-
http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace.htm
Appended below are news items that might be of interest to researchers
interested in agent-based computational economics (ACE), the computational
study of economies modelled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting
agents.
ACE news items are posted at the ACE website in batched html-document form
about once every two months during the regular academic year
(September--May). Whenever a new posting is made, a brief announcement
giving a pointer to this posting is emailed to all participants in a
moderated announcements-only Majordomo ACE news list. If you would like to
subscribe to (unsubscribe from) this announcements-only ACE news list, please
send an email message to
majordomo@iastate.edu
with the following message in the email body:
- subscribe (unsubscribe) acenewslist youremailaddress
- end
with your actual email address in place of youremailaddress. For more
information, please visit the
ACE News List Site
Thank you.
Book Announcements
Stan Liebowitz, Re-Thinking the Network Economy: The True
Forces that Drive the Digital Marketplace, AMACOM, 210 pp.,
September 2002. ISBN 0-814-40649-1
From the Publisher: "What has become eminently apparent
since the dot-com collapse is that standard economic theories apply
to Internet business just as much as they do to any other
enterprise. Many dot-coms have failed, but e-commerce isn't going
away, and business leaders need to understand what went wrong in
order to dominate in the real new economy. (This book) examines
exactly where, how, and why so many e-commerce firms went wrong, and
how, utilizing traditional economic concepts, businesses can build
the foundation for success in the future."
Stan J. Liebowitz is Professor of Managerial Economics at the
University of Texas at Dallas.
Mauro F. Guillen, Randall Collins, Paula England, and Marshall
Meyer (eds.), The New Economic Sociology, Russell Sage
Foundation, New York, N.Y., 344 pp., May 2002. ISBN 0-871-54343-5
From the Publisher: "As the American economy surged in the
1990s, economic sociology made great strides as well. Economists
and sociologists worked across disciplinary boundaries to study the
booming market as both a product and a producer of culture, tracing
the correlations they saw between economic and social phenomena. In
the process, they debated the methodological issues that arose from
their interdisciplinary perspectives. (This book) provides an
overview of these debates and assesses the state of the burgeoning
discipline. The contributors summarize economic sociology's
accomplishments to date, identifying key theoretical problems and
opportunities, and formulating strategies for future research in the
field... The contributors concur that economic action must be
interpreted through the cultural understandings that lend it
stability and meaning. By rendering these often complex debates
accessible, (this book) makes a significant contribution to this
still rapidly developing field, and provides a useful guide for
future avenues of research."
Mauro F. Guillen is Associate Professor of Management at the
Wharton School and Associate Professor of Sociology at the
University of Pennsylvania. Randall Collins is Professor of
Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Paula England is
Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Marshall Meyer
is Professor of Management and Sociology at the University of
Pennsylvania.
Marco A. Janssen (ed.), Complexity and Ecosystem Management:
The Theory and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, Edward Elgar,
360 pp., December 2002. ISBN 1-843-76061-4
From the publisher: "The quality of ecosystems is affected
by the actions of different stakeholders who use them in a variety
of ways. In order to understand this complex relationship between
humans and nature, it is vital to understand the complexity of the
interacting agents. The authors in this book attempt to do this by
applying multi-agent systems to the problems of ecosystem
management. The multi-agent approach to ecosystem management is a
relatively new and rapidly developing field which takes a formal
computational approach towards the interaction of humans and their
environment. The authors highlight some of the promising new
methodologies which are emerging in the field from disciplines such
as computer science and computational social science. They move on
to address a number of important topics including diffusion
processes, common-pool resources, land use change and the
participatory use of models, in an attempt to solve contemporary
management issues. They demonstrate the potential utility of
multi-agent systems in the context of theoretical problems and
practical case studies."
Marco A. Janssen is Associate Research Scientist, Center
for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change,
Indiana University, Bloomington.
Rosaria Conte, Mario Paolucci, and Robert Herd Fairbairn (eds.),
Reputation in Artificial Societies: Social Beliefs for Social
Order, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 222 pp., December 2002. ISBN:
1-402-07186-8
From the publisher: "(This book) discusses the role of
reputation in the achievement of social order. The book proposes
that reputation is an agent property that results from transmission
of beliefs about how the agents are evaluated with regard to a
socially desirable conduct. This desirable conduct represents one
or another of the solutions to the problem of social order and may
consist of cooperation or altruism, reciprocity, or norm obedience.
(This book) distinguishes between image (direct evaluation of others)
and reputation (propagating metabelief, indirectly acquired) and
investigates their effects with regard to both natural and
electronic societies. The interplay between image and reputation,
the process leading to them, and the set of decisions that agents
make on their basis are demonstrated with supporting data from
agentbased simulations."
Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language
and the Brain, W. W. Norton and Co., New York, N.Y., 527 pp., April 1998.
ISBN 0-393-31574-4
From the publisher: "This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to
long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his
breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a
wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the
co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years
of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's
newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these
insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the
brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to
much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a
computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanisms of
mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being
human."
Terrence W. Deacon is associate professor of biological anthropology at
Boston University and also conducts research at the McLean Hospital at the
Harvard Medical School.
Michael Arbib (ed.), The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural
Networks: Second Edition, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1344
pp., November 2002. ISBN 0-262-01197-2
From the Publisher: "Dramatically updating and extending the
first edition, published in 1995, the second edition of (this book)
presents the enormous progress made in recent years in the many
subfields related to the two great questions: How does the brain
work? and, How can we build intelligent machines? Once again, the
heart of the book is a set of almost 300 articles covering the whole
spectrum of topics in brain theory and neural networks. ... The
second edition greatly increases the coverage of models of
fundamental neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, and neural network
approaches to language. It contains 287 articles, compared to the
266 in the first edition. Articles on topics from the first edition
have been updated by the original authors or written anew by new
authors, and there are 106 articles on new topics."
Michael A. Arbib is Professor of Computer Science and
Neurscience, and Director of the Center for Neural Engineering, at
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Moshe Sipper, Machine Nature: The Coming Age of
Bio-Inspired Computing, McGraw-Hill, 244 pp., July 2002. ISBN:
0-071-38704-8
From the publisher: "An enthralling look at how computer
scientists have crossed the line between machines and living
organisms. Sipper takes readers on a thrilling journey to the terra
nova of computing, to provide a compelling look at cutting-edge
computers, robots, and machines now and in the decades ahead."
Moshe Sipper is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University, Isreal, and a Visiting
Professor in the Logic Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.
James P. Crutchfield and Peter Schuster (eds.), Evolutionary
Dynamics: Exploring the Interplay of Selection, Accident,
Neutrality, and Function, Oxford University Press, New York,
N.Y., 480 pp., November 2002. ISBN 0-195-14264-0
From the Publisher: "This book is an assessment and review
of the recent progress in integating evolutionary modeling and
computation, molecular and developmental evolution, and nonlinear
population dynamics into evolutionary theory. It brings together a
wide range of eminent researchers in evolutionary dynamics in order
to formulate a comprehensive theory that builds on nonlineeeear
mathematics and physics. The text is divided into four sections:
macroevolution; epochal evolution; population genetics, dynamics,
and optimization; andevolution of cooperation, each containing
several in-depth chapters and discussions."
James P. Crutchfield is a theoretical physicist and Research
Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Peter Schuster is Professor of
Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Vienna and an external
faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute.
Dieter Fensel, James Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang
Wahlster (eds.), foreward by Tim Berners-Lee, Spinning the Semantic
Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential,
The MIT Press, 392 pp., November 2002. ISBN: 0-262-06232-1
From the publisher: "This first handbook for the Semantic Web
covers, among other topics, software agents that can negotiate and
collect information, markup languages that can tag many more types
of information in a document, and knowledge systems that enable
machines to read Web pages and determine their reliability. The
truly interdiscipinary Semantic Web combines aspects of artificial
intelligence, markup languages, natural language processing,
information retrieval, knowledge representation, intelligent agents,
and databases."
Rodolfo R. Llinas, I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self, The MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 264 pp., April 2002. ISBN 0-262-12233-2
From the publisher: "In (this book), Rodolfo Llinas, a founding father of
modern brain science, presents an original view of the evolution and nature of
mind. According to Llinas, the `mindness state' evolved to allow predictive
interactions between mobile creatures and their environment. To move through
the environment safely, a creature must anticipate the outcome of each
movement on the basis of incoming sensory data. Thus the capacity to predict
is most likely the ultimate brain function. One could even say that Self is
the centralization of prediction. At the heart of Llinas's theory is the
concept of oscillation. Many neurons possess electrical activity, manifested
as oscillating variations in the minute voltages across the cell membrane.
On the crests of these oscillations occur larger electrical events that are
the basis for neuron-to-neuron communication. Like cicadas chirping in
unison, a group of neurons oscillating in phase can resonate with a distant
group of neurons. This simultaneity of neuronal activity is the
neurobiological root of cognition. Although the internal state that we call
the mind is guided by the senses, it is also generated by the oscillations
within the brain. Thus, in a certain sense, one could say that we live in a
kind of virtual reality."
Rodolfo R. Llinas is the Thomas and Susanne Murphy Professor of
Neuroscience and Chairman of the Department of Physiology and Neuroscience at
the New York University School of Medicine.
Journal Announcements
- Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
- Issue No. 4 of Volume 5 of the Journal of Artificial Societies
and Social Simulation (JASSS), edited by Nigel Gilbert (University of
Surrey), was published on October 31, 2002.
- This issue contains five articles on topics such as
extremism, simulation of computer-mediated negotiations, network
structures and agreement in social network simulations, group
reputation and beneficent norms, and identifying cases of social
contagion by means of memetic isolation using an ethnographic data
set. In the Forum section, Laurie Brown and Ann Harding review
micro-simulation research that they and their colleagues have been
doing in Australia focusing on social security, welfare, and health
policies. Finally, the Books Reviews section includes reviews for
six recent books.
- JASSS is an electronic, refereed journal devoted to the
exploration and understanding of social processes by means of
computer simulation. The new issue can be accessed through the
JASSS home page at
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/.
- Economic Systems Research
- From the publisher: "Economic Systems Research is a double peer
reviewed scientific journal dedicated to the furtherance of theoretical and
factual knowledge about economic systems, economic structures and their
change through time and space, at the subnational, national and international
level. The journal contains sensible, matter-of-fact tools and data for
modelling, policy analysis, planning, and decision making in large economic
environments. ... Topics within the purview of the journal include linear and
nonlinear multisectoral models of structure and structural change and
development, ecosystems and the treatment of depletable resources,
environmental and strategic questions, databases and data banks, large-scale
computational methods and languages. The journal includes reviews of
pertinent literature and special issues on new emerging areas of research in
its field."
- Economic Systems Research, published by Routledge (Taylor and
Francis Group), is the official journal of the International Input-Output
Association. For more information, visit
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/09535314.html
- Management and Governance
- From the publisher (Kluwer Academic Publishers): "The Journal
of Management and Governance (JMG) is devoted to the inquiry into the
cognitive and relational foundations of governance, and into the analysis and
design of governance structures and their relations with management, in
the private as well as the public sector. Governance goes beyond `corporate
governance', and includes the modes of allocating decision, control and reward
rights within and between economic organizations, giving rise to a variety of
forms of market, industry, and firm organization. ... The journal is
characterized by methodological pluralism. Any research strategy is
admitted, if effective for the issue at hand and rigorous with respect to the
rules of the adopted methodology -- be it laboratory or field
experimentation, survey research, case study research or documental and
economic statistics analysis."
- For more information, visit
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1385-3457
- Web Intelligence and Agent Systems
- From the publisher (IOS Press): "Web Intelligence and Agent
Systems: An International Journal (WIAS) is the official journal of the
Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC). WIAS seeks to collaborate with major
societies and international conferences in the fields. Presently, it has
established a tie with the IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web
Intelligence (WI) and the IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent
Agent Technology (IAT). WIAS is a peer-reviewed journal which publishes
four issues a year in both electronic and hard copies. WIAS aims to achieve
a disciplinary balance between Web technology and intelligent agent
technology. It is committed to deepening the understanding of computational,
logical, cognitive, physical, and social foundations as well as the enabling
technologies for developing and applying Web-based intelligence and
autonomous agents systems. All manuscripts for consideration must be
submitted electronically through an Electronic Submission Form, available
from the WIC homepage at
http://wi-consortium.org/journal.html
- Applied Soft Computing
- Applied Soft Computing (ASC) is the official journal
of the World Federation on Soft Computing. Published by Elsevier,
ASC is an international journal promoting an integrated view
of soft computing to solve real life problems. Soft computing is a
collection of methodologies that aim to exploit tolerance for
imprecision, uncertainty, and partial truth to achieve tractability,
robustness, and low solution cost. The goal of ASC is to
publish high quality research, with rapid publication turn-around,
in the areas of fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutionary
computing, rough sets, and other similar techniques to address real
world complexities.
- For more information, visit
http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/store/6/2/1/9/2/0/621920.pub.htt
Software and Hardware Announcements
- Game Theory Software
- Gambit is a library of game theory software and tools for the
construction and analysis of finite extensive and normal form games
developed by a group of researchers at the California Institute of
Technology. Gambit includes a graphical user interface, the Gambit
Command Language, and a library of C++ source code for representing
games, suitable for use in other applications. All Gambit source
code is freely available, licensed under the GNU General Public
License. For more information, visit
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/gambit/
- The Java Tutorial
- The Java Tutorial, maintained by Sun Microsystems,
Inc., is a practical online guide for programmers with hundreds of
complete working examples and numerous pointers to basic information
(running your first program, getting started, learning the Java
language, etc.). The site can be accessed at
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/
- Human-Environment Modelling
- A research group at Michigan State University let by Kostas
Alexandridis maintains a research facility named the Human-Environment
Modeling and Analysis Facility (HEMA). The research group is developing a
multi-agent model called MABEL (Multi-Agent Based Economic Landscape) using
the Swarm architecture. Their objective is to combine geographical,
environmental, socioeconomic and institutional components into a unified
simulation framework. They are also involved in developing artificial neural
networks for static predictions of urban sprawl dynamics using the LTM (Land
Transformation Model). For more information on Mabel and the LTM, visit the
MABEL website at
http://www.mabel.msu.edu
and the LTM website at
http://www.ltm.msu.edu
Websites
- Web-Based Game Theory Experiments
-
Ariel Rubinstein and Eli Zvuluny (School of Economics, Tel Aviv
University, and Princeton University, New Jersey) maintain a website
titled "Didactic Web-Based Experiments in Game Theory." The purpose
of the site is to provide the teachers of basic game theory courses
with free user-friendly didactic tools for conducting web-based
thought experiments. The website can be assessed at
http://gametheory.tau.ac.il/
- Honest Signalling
- Carl T. Bergstrom (Department of Zoology, University of
Washington, Seattle) maintains a website titled "An Introduction to
the Theory of Honest Signalling." Topics covered at this website
include an introduction to the basic honest signalling problem,
honest signalling problems in biology, honest signalling problems in
economics, and the mathematics of honest signalling. The website
can be accessed at
http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/
- Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science
-
The Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) at the Arlington,
Virginia campus of George Mason University uses human-subject laboratory
experiments to test economic theories. The ICES is led by Professor Vernon
L. Smith, a seminal contributor to the use of human-subject experiments in
economics and one of two recipients of this year's Bank of Sweden Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (the "Nobel Prize in Economics").
The ICES recently moved from its long-time home at the University of Arizona,
where it was known as the Economic Science Laboratory. The ICES is currently
focusing on the design and testing of markets for electric power, water, and
spectrum licenses. For more information about the ICES, visit
http://www.ices-gmu.org/
- Bibliography of Experimental Economics and Social Science
- Professor Charles A. Holt (Department of Economics, University of
Virginia) maintains a site titled the "Y2K Bibliography of Experimental
Economics and Social Science" that lists exactly 2000 publications in
experimental economics and social science, together with about 500 discussion
papers. Each entry is arranged by keyword topic. The database can be
searched by author or keyword. To access the database, visit
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~cah2k/y2k.htm
- Social Psychology Network
- The Social Psychology Network is an extensive database on social
psychology maintained by Scott Plous (Weslyan University) and supported by
the National Science Foundation. The database provides more than 5,000 links
to psychology-related resources. The database can be searched by topic or
keyword. For access to the database, visit
http://www.socialpsychology.org/
- Complex Systems Network
- The complEX sYSTEms Network of exCEllence (EXYSTENCE) is supported by the
Future Emerging Technologies unit of the European Commission. The aim of
EXYSTENCE is to facilitate collaboration among European academic researchers
and participants in business and industry who are interested in complex
systems, from fundamental concepts to applications. For more information,
visit
http://www.complexityscience.org/index.php
- Self-Organized Networks
- Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (Department of Physics, Notre Dame,
Indiana) directs a research group focusing on the emergence and evolution of
networks in various contexts (e.g., metabolic and genetic networks, actor
networks, collaborative networks). A key finding of the group is that
statistical physics permits these diverse networks to be captured within a
single framework. Information about this research and related network
research can be found at the Self-Organized Networks site maintained by the
group, accessible at
http://www.nd.edu/~networks/
- Small World and Evolving Networks
- J. F. F. Mendes (University of Porto, Portugal) maintains a resource site
titled "Small World and Evolving Networks" that provides pointers to
publications, discussion papers, and links related to this topic area. The
site can be accessed at
http://www.fc.up.pt/fis/jfmendes/net.html
- TEAMCORE Research Group
- Professor Milind Tambe (Computer Science, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles) leads a TEAMCORE group whose research is focused on
"agent teams." The basic principle advocated by the group is that "the right
way to have agents (including software agents, robots and people) work
together is via the concept of teamwork, as opposed to master-slave
relationships, castes, contracts, etc." For more information about this
research, visit
http://www.isi.edu/teamcore/
Miscellaneous News Items
- Center for Social Complexity
- George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia) has established a
multidisciplinary Center for Social Complexity (CSC) that
will focus on the relatively new and growing field of computational
social science, the scientific investigation of social phenomena
using computer models, algorithms, and related information
technology methods. Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, the director of the
CSC, describes computational social science as the `exciting 21st
century frontier in the social sciences.'
- IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computational
Intelligence
- The Technical Committee on Computational Intelligence (TCCI) of the IEEE
Computer Society deals with tools and systems using biologically and
linguistically motivated computational paradigms, such as artificial neural
networks, fuzzy logic, evolutionary optimization, self-organization, rough
sets, data mining, Web intelligence, intelligent agent technology, parallel
and distributed information processing, and virtual reality. The TCCI
sponsors the IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial
Intelligence (ICTAI), and co-sponsors the IEEE International Conference on
Data Mining (ICDM) with TC-PAMI, the IEEE/WIC International Joint Conference
on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI/IAT) with the WIC.
- If you are a member of the IEEE Computer Society, you may join the TCCI
without cost. For more information, visit the TCCI home page at
http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~xwu/tfvi/index.shtml
- The Web Intelligence Newsletter
- From the Web Intelligence Newsletter (Issue 1, September 2002):
"Web Intelligence (WI) is a new direction for scientific research and
development that explores the fundamental roles as well as practical impacts
of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced Information Technology (IT) on
the next generation of Web-empowered products, systems, services, and
activities. It is the key and the most urgent research field of IT in the era
of Web and agent intelligence."
- For additional information, visit
http://wi-consortium.org/
Reminder: Items Requested for ACE News Notes and Complexity
Just a reminder that if you have any ACE-related news items, or
any information about ACE-related books, journals, software,
websites, or teaching materials that you would like to have
considered for inclusion in the ACE news notes, and/or the
Complexity-at-Large section of the John Wiley journal
Complexity, please email them to me (along with website
information if available) at the following address:
tesfatsi@iastate.edu
Copyright © 2002 Leigh Tesfatsion. All Rights Reserved.