Hello blog-world. I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been working on some pretty cool research, including a Mathematica implementation of the Metropolis Algorithm for social network (ERGM) analysis. I will add it to the site when I complete it.  You should be excited.  Anyway, for the sake of record-keeping, here are the courses I am looking forward to taking next term here at Northwestern.

• Applied Math 495 – Dynamical Processes on Networks – This is an applied math course, so I expect it to be pretty challenging. However, it is on my research specialty, social networks.  I’m taking this course with an undergrad friend of mine who really knows his stuff, so this should be a great course. It’s taught by Dirk Brockman, who has done some cool research.
• Economics 410-3 – This is the third series in the dreaded PhD level economics sequence. The theme for next quarter is game theory.  The theme this semester was general equilibrium theory. So, yeah. I’m happy to be moving on to game theory, something I’m more comfortable with.  The course is taught by Michael Whinston, the guy that co-wrote the infamous Mas-Collell (MWG) textbook.  I’m looking forward to this course but I’m also terrified.
• Computer Science 495 – Algorithmic Mechanism Design – One of my co-advisers, Jason Hartline is teaching this course. His research speciality is mechanism design and his last few papers have been focused around bayesian and prior-free settings. I expect this course to be rigorous mathematically but have lots of applied uses in research, especially since I started at NU wanting to do computational mechanism design work.
• I’m also auditing a course taught by Uri Wilinsky on NetLogo, a really cool agent-based modeling software that I used for a while when I was at Michigan. The course is a 300-level, so if the workload isn’t too bad, I may take it for credit. Otherwise, I will just audit it and work at getting better at the software which can be used in a lot of simulation settings, especially when plugged into Mathematica.

Anyway, my final project for the randomized algorithms course is due in a few weeks, so once I complete it, I will post the assignment and the mathematica plugin on my website. So far, it seems like it may be a helpful overview of the research into exponential random graph models (ERGM) for those interested in algorithms.