Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA) have been proposed as a paradigm for reasoning about cultural groups, terror groups, and other socio-economic-political-military organizations worldwide. In this paper, we describe a case study that shows how SOMA was used to model the behavior of the terrorist organization, Hamas. Our team, consisting of a mix of computer scientists, policy experts, a...

Title of dissertation: Essays on Economic Spillovers, Labor Markets, and Economic Development Ben Zou Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Dissertation directed by: Professor Judith K. Hellerstein Professor Sebastian Galiani Department of Economics Location-based policies are widely used across the world in the hope of stimulating particular local economies. This dissertation consists of three chapters o...

In this paper, based on dynamic programming we investigate the military spending, trade and wealth accumulation in a stochastic endogenous growth model. For the CobbDauglas utility function, explicit solutions of the optimal problem in the home country are obtained, and the optimal consumptions of domestic goods and foreign goods, the share of domestic capital stock and foreign bond holdings ar...

An enduring and important debate in economics concerns the effects of military spending on economic growth. It has generated a huge literature, with a variety of results and no clear consensus. The end of the Cold War led to marked reductions in military burdens and to renewed concerns on whether this was likely to lead to a ‘peace dividend’ or a ‘peace penalty’. This paper revisits the debate ...

C perplexes the world. The country’s rapid rise to global economic power poses an important set of questions regarding how one should perceive the transformation of the international system in light of this epochal change: —Is China on track to become a new superpower? If so, how will this transform the global economic and political landscape? —Will this ongoing power shift be comparable in sca...

-The objective of the present project is to develop solutions to improve energy efficiency in electric grids. The basic approach adopted in this research is based on a new concept in the Micro Grid, namely Demand/Response Optimization, which enables the implementation of the autonomous demand side energy management for a big variety of consumers, ranging from homes to buildings, factories, comm...

One-third of all human deaths are due to poverty-related causes, to malnutrition and to diseases that can be prevented or cured cheaply. Yet our politicians, academics, and mass media show little concern for how such poverty might be reduced. They are more interested in possible military interventions to stop human rights violations in developing countries, even though such interventions – at b...

OBJECTIVE Past self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITB) are robust predictors of future suicide risk, but no studies have explored the prevalence of SITB occurring prior to military service among military personnel and veterans, or the association of premilitary SITB with suicidal ideation and suicide attempts during or after military service. The current study explores these issues in two ...