The Institute of International Relations (Turkmen: Halkara Gatnaşyklary Instituty; Russian: Институт международных отношений) is the diplomatic academy of Turkmenistan, which is considered the country's "national school of diplomacy." It was formally created on March 20, 2008, by decree of Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow.

Ole Ivar Løvaas (8 May 1927 – 2 August 2010) was a Norwegian-American clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is most well-known for his research on early behavior modification to teach autistic children through prompts, modeling, and positive reinforcement. The technique also had a history of using aversives to reduce undesired behaviors. Lovaas founded the Lovaas Institute and co-founded the Autism Society of America. He is also considered a pioneer of what we now call applied behavior analysis with his development of discrete trial training and early intensive behavioral intervention for autistic children. A 2018 Cochrane literature review found evidence that the intervention can increase their IQ, adaptive functioning, as well as receptive and expressive language scores despite some research design limitations. While Lovaas denounced the use of punishing aversives in 1993, some facilities continued to use them. The Judge Rotenberg Center was the last remaining facility to use electric shocks to modify behavior in students with disabilities before the practice was banned in 2020. His work influenced how autism is treated, and Lovaas received widespread acclaim and several awards for his work during his lifetime.