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Events for April 11, 2014
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Apr 11, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shaddin Dughmi, USC Computer Science
Talk Title: On the hardness of signaling
Series: AISeminar
Abstract: There has been a recent surge of interest in algorithmic questions relating to information revelation in games and auctions. Given that equilibrium outcomes of a game are intimately related to the beliefs of its participants, how should a "market maker" with access to additional information, and equipped with a specified objective, inform players in the game? We consider the computational complexity of two of the simplest instantiations of this question: (1) A Bayesian zero-sum game in which the principal must choose an information structure maximizing the equilibrium payoff of one ofthe players; (2) A single-item auction in which the seller possesses additional information regarding the item for sale, and must release, subject to a communication constraint, information regarding the item so as to maximize the resulting welfare at equilibrium. In both cases, we show that optimal signaling is computationally intractable, and in fact hard to approximate, assuming that it is hard to recover a planted dense subgraph in a random undirected graph.
Biography: Shaddin Dughmi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at USC, where he is a member of the Theory Group. He received a B.S. in computer science, summa cum laude, from Cornell University in 2004, and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2011. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Arthur L. Samuel best doctoral thesis award, and the ACM EC best student paper award.
Host: Greg Ver Steeg
More Info: PER SPEAKER'S REQUEST, THIS WILL NOT BE WEBCASTED
Webcast: PER SPEAKER'S REQUEST, THIS WILL NOT BE WEBCASTEDLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135
WebCast Link: PER SPEAKER'S REQUEST, THIS WILL NOT BE WEBCASTED
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
Event Link: PER SPEAKER'S REQUEST, THIS WILL NOT BE WEBCASTED
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar- Farshad Kooti:Network Weirdness: Exploring the Origins of Network Paradoxes
Fri, Apr 11, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Farshad Kooti, USC/ ISI
Talk Title: Network Weirdness: Exploring the Origins of Network Paradoxes
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Social networks have many counter-intuitive properties, including the ââ¬Åfriendship paradoxââ¬Â that states, on average, your friends have more friends than you do. Recently, a variety of other paradoxes were demonstrated in online social networks. This paper explores the origins of these network paradoxes. Specifically, we ask whether they arise from mathematical properties of the networks or whether they have a behavioral origin. We show that sampling from fat-tailed distributions always gives rise to a paradox in the mean, but not the median. We propose a strong form of network paradoxes, based on utilizing the median, and validate it empirically using data from two online social networks. Specifically, we show that for any user the majority of userââ¬â¢s friends and followers have more friends, followers, etc. than the user, and that this cannot be explained by statistical properties of sampling. Next, we explore the behavioral origins of the paradoxes by using the shuffle test to remove correlations between node degrees and attributes. We find that paradoxes for the mean persist in the shuffled network, but not for the median. We demonstrate that strong paradoxes arise due to the assortativity of user attributes, including degree, and correlation between degree and attribute.
Biography: Home Page:
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~kooti/
Host: Kevin Knight & Yang Gao
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey @ ISI-Info Sciences Inst.
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
