Workshops: Friday August 8
Overview:
8:30 AM–12:30 PM Drawing Conclusions from Time Series, Metzger and Bird
1:30-5:30 PM Introduction to Fractals and Chaos, Liebovitch
Agent-Based Computational Laboratories, Dibble
Cost: $125 regular, $75 students. Special offer: $200 two-workshop deal.
Drawing Conclusions from Time Series
Instructors: Drs. Mary Ann Metzger and Dick Bird
Time: 8:30 AM–12:30 PM
Aims: This workshop is designed to get results from your time series. Open that file-drawer and get your data into action! The emphasis will be on analyzing time series, including very short series, that are suspected to be nonlinear and nonstationary and performing meaningful analyses of time series data.
Part 1: Time series analysis: Finding and evaluating models (MAM)
· Definitions and summary of ARMA analysis.
· Role of linear approximations for short-term prediction.
· Methods for describing attractors and summarizing dynamics of nonlinear nonstationary time series: Bayesian multiprocess models.
· Using results for prediction, classification, and comparison.
· Examples from operant conditioning, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder in children and from two-person conversations.
Part 2: Issues in Chaos Analysis (DB)
· Stationarity v non-stationarity of time series.
· Reconstruction of the attractor - Takens Theorem.
· Programs for extraction of chaos parameters (CDA, Santis & Skinner's D2)
· The importance of surrogating. Surrogating methods.
· Examples from EEG, economics and climate data.
In both parts of the workshop, participants are invited to bring their own empirical time series for exercises.
Prof. Bird will be demonstrating and distributing software on CD. Participants with their own laptops are encouraged to bring them to the session.
Mary Ann Metzger has degrees in Mathematics and Psychology from the University of Connecticut, and postdoctoral work in Mathematical Psychology at the Rockefeller University, New York. She was a member of the Psychology Department faculty at UMBC from 1973 to 1999 and is now Emerita. Her specialty is the application of systems dynamics to understanding psychological processes, including intellectual development, developmental disorders, and patterns of family relations. Relevant reading for the workshop: Mary Ann Metzger (1995), Tracking sequences of attractors in cognitive state-space. In R. Post and T. van Gelder (Eds.) Mind as Motion: Dynamics, Behavior, and Cognition, MIT Press.
Dick Bird is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Northumbria University, UK and has degrees in mathematics and in psychology. Dick is the author of two books on the use of computers in experimental psychology and teaches an option on Chaos theory applications to the B Sc Hons Psychology degree. Useful advance reading might be: Paul A. Waters (1999), “Psychophysiology, Cortical Arousal and Dynamical Complexity,” Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology and Life Sciences, Vol 5 No. 1 pp. 211-229. Handouts will be provided at the workshop.
Introduction to Fractals and Chaos
Instructor: Dr. Larry S. Liebovitch
Time: 1:30-5:30 PM
This workshop will present an introduction to fractals and chaos and their applications to biological data in a way that even those with a limited background in mathematics can understand. Fractals are things that have pieces that are ever smaller copies of the bigger pieces. A tree is fractal. It has ever finer branches that are smaller copies of the larger branches. Fractals can be used to better understand the structure and function of proteins, cells, the heart, and the brain.
Chaos means simple systems that do surprisingly complex things. Chaos can be used to better understand the surprising things that molecules, cells, and people do. The topics covered will include 1) Fractals Introduction, Self-Similarity, Scaling, Dimension, Statistical Properties, 2) Chaos Introduction, Phase Space, Sensitivity to Initial Conditions, Bifurcations, Analyzing Data, and Control of Chaos. The presentation will be based on the book, Fractals and Chaos Simplified for the Life Sciences, by L. S. Liebovitch, Oxford University Press, 1998, which consists of facing pages, the left one with words, the right one with pictures that lead you, one thought at a time, through this material.
Dr. Liebovitch is a Professor at Florida Atlantic University with appointments there in the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, the Center for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, and the Department of Psychology. He has used nonlinear methods, including fractals, chaos, and neural networks to study molecular, genetic, cellular, physiological, and information systems such as motions in proteins, the timing of heart attacks, the swimming of one-cell organisms, and the spread of computer viruses. He has also been developing a CD-ROM with curricula materials for a mathematics course for non-science students who never liked and never did well in math which uses fractals to show how mathematicians think about mathematics. He is the author or co-author of 2 books, 64 articles, and has given presentations in the U.S., Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France Germany, Israel, Poland, and Sweden.
Agent-Based Computational Laboratories
Instructor: Dr. Catherine Dibble
Time: 1:30-5:30 PM
This workshop is for anyone
interested in agent-based research strategies. The workshop emphasizes
computational laboratory modeling and science. Research
thinking and interests are far more important than programming skills for this
workshop. Nontechnical researchers are welcome and encouraged to
attend.
After a brief historical overview of agent-based approaches and platforms, the
workshop will focus on RePast (from U Chicago Social Science Research Computing,
a 2nd generation clone of Swarm that has especially strong support for social
science modeling), GeoGraphs (which allow for agent simulations on network
landscapes, including small-world and scale-free networks), and Genetic
Algorithms (which mimic natural evolutionary processes to find adaptive
solutions to highly complex problems, and which work as complements to
agent-based simulations at several levels), with an emphasis on model design,
experimental design, and on how agent-based computational laboratories
complement other approaches to research. Application examples
will illustrate the utility of this research approach in exploring topics such
as the evolution of organizations, epidemiology, settlement patterns,
globalization processes, the effects of social and spatial structures on the
evolution of conflict and cooperation, and the evolution of inequality.
Handouts will be provided, along with a web site from which to download and
install computational laboratory software and related development software.
Dr. Catherine Dibble is an economic geographer at the University of Maryland. She has decades of experience and training in evolutionary systems and scientific method, formal economic theory and game theory, computer science, theoretical geography, and especially computational laboratories. She has been working professionally with simulation models of many types since 1980, with genetic algorithms since 1993, and with agent-based simulations since 1995. Her publications so far cover new designs for handling spatial structure and solving location-allocation problems using genetic algorithms, for representing absolute and relative space and time in genetics based machine learning, and for genetic evolution of optimal organizational designs under disparate conditions. She is the inventor of the general purpose GeoGraph library for Swarm and RePast, which supports the construction of agent-based models on richly structured network landscapes such as organizations, social institutions, and geographic landscapes. Dr. Dibble teaches advanced PhD seminars in Computational Laboratories and leads an active Computational Laboratory research group at the University of Maryland.