Report: Workshop on Agent-Based Modeling of Financial Markets
Note: The following workshop summary was received in January 1999
from Michael de la Maza of the Redfire Capital Management Group
(RedfireGrp@aol.com) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The First Workshop on Agent-based Modeling of Financial Markets was
held on November 17, 1998 in Washington, DC. Approximately thirty people
listened to talks given by four speakers: Blake LeBaron of Brandeis
University, Thor Sigvaldason and Bernhard Borges of PricewaterhouseCoopers,
David Collings of BT Labs, and Richard Pryor of Sandia National Laboratories.
Following the invited talks, the audience engaged in a discussion about the
future role of agent-based methods in understanding financial markets. More
information is available from the organizers of the workshop: Redfire Capital
Management Group (RedfireGrp@aol.com).
Report: Second International Conference on Complex Systems
Note: The following news item is a shortened version of a conference
summary received in December 1998 from Yaneer Bar-Yam (NECSI,
yaneer@nesci.org).
The Second International Conference on Complex Systems, hosted by
the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), was held in Nashua, New
Hampshire, during the week of October 25-30, 1998. The conference was
attended by over 230 participants. This is the main international conference
dedicated to the unified study of complex systems. Central to the purpose of
the conference is building an international community that is devoted to this
new field.
From the first Monday morning talk by Nobel laureate Philip
Anderson -- on emergence and the relevance of complex systems to physics --
to the final panel that included many of the great management gurus of this
generation, the conference was an active, vigorous dialog between the
knowledge of diverse disciplines and the new unifying concepts of complex
systems. The plenary session topics this year were: emergence, description
and modeling, self-organization, networks, time series, agents in action, and
complexity and management. Talks in these sessions often focused on
contributions in specific disciplines but each session contained a diverse
set of disciplines to show the diverse strategies and concepts that can be
applied generally to complex systems. The breakout sessions covered a
diverse range of topics from dynamics of physical systems to new concepts in
human organizations, from quantum computing to DNA computing to neural
computing to ecology. A special Friday sesson was also held on complexity
and the managament of human organizations.
The Third International Conference on Complex Systems is already
being planned. Requests for information about this conference can be sent to
iccs@necsi.org. For general information about NECSI, an independent
educational and research institution dedicated to the study of complex
systems that was founded in 1997, visit the NECSI web site at
http://www.necsi.org/.