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Events for March 10, 2011
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CS Colloquium
Thu, Mar 10, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Makoto Yokoo, Kyushu University
Talk Title: Cooperative Game Theory: A New Frontier for Agent Researchers
Abstract: Cooperative game theory deals with how (selfish) agents can create a coalition and divide the gain of the coalition among them, when agents can negotiate before taking their actions. This research topic has 60-year tradition (started by von Neumann), and various solution concepts (e.g. core, Shapley value) that describe how to determine the value division have been developed. Furthermore, the growth of Internet and e-commerce has expanded its application area (e.g. dynamic, agile formations of virtual organizations). In this talk, I give a brief overview of traditional results on cooperative game theory, and describe new challenging topics for agent/AI/CS researchers, such as coalitional structure generation and concise representation schemes.
Biography: Makoto Yokoo received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, form the University of Tokyo, Japan, and the Ph.D. degree in information and communication engineering in 1995, from the University of Tokyo, Japan. From 1986 to 2004, he was a research scientist of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT). He is currently a Professor of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University. His esearch interests include multi-agent systems, constraint satisfaction, and mechanism design among self-interested agents. He served as a general co-chair of International joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems in 2007 (AAMAS-2007), and as a program co-chair of AAMAS-2003. He is on the board of directors of International Foundation for Autonomous Agent and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS). He received the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2004, and the IFAAMAS influential paper award in 2010.
Host: Prof. Milind Tambe
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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CS Colloquium
Thu, Mar 10, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shaddin Dughmi, Stanford University
Talk Title: Randomization and Computation in Strategic Settings
Abstract: In resource allocation problems, a centralized agency allocates resources to
recipients: an Internet Service Provider allocates bandwidth to consumers; the Federal Communications Commission auctions radio spectra to telecommunications companies; and a content distribution company designs an overlay network to satisfy its customers' routing needs. Often, the agency's goal is to find an allocation that maximizes the social good. This goal is complicated by the fact that the recipients are self-interested, and their actions influence the allocation.
Economists cope with self-interested behavior by designing mechanisms that align individual incentives with the social good. This requires finding an optimal solution to the -- often intractable -- resource allocation problem.
Computer scientists cope with intractability by designing approximation algorithms. Until recently, it appeared difficult to unify these techniques and design incentive-compatible computationally-efficient mechanisms for computing approximately optimal allocations. Impossibility results regarding deterministic mechanisms suggest that this difficulty is fundamental.
My work harnesses the power of randomization to reconcile economic and computational requirements in settings where deterministic mechanisms provably can not. My colleagues and I (1) developed general techniques for the design of randomized mechanisms, (2) applied these techniques to solve some of the paradigmatic problems in this area, and (3) developed a black box reduction that, for a large class of problems, generically converts an approximation algorithm to an incentive compatible mechanism without degrading its approximation guarantee.
Biography: Shaddin Dughmi is a PhD student in the computer science theory group at Stanford University, advised by Professor Tim Roughgarden. His main research interests are in algorithms, game theory, and combinatorial optimization. Shaddin graduated from Cornell University in 2004 with a B.S. in computer science and a minor in applied mathematics. From 2004 to 2006, he was an Information Security Engineer at the MITRE Corporation, where he worked on cryptographic protocol analysis. He enrolled in the Stanford computer science PhD program in the Fall of 2006, with an expected graduation date of June 2011.
Host: Prof. David Kempe
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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AI SEMINAR
Thu, Mar 10, 2011 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, Information Sciences Institute, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chris Welty, Research staff member, IBM Watson Research Center
Talk Title: Inside the mind of Watson
Abstract: Watson is a computer system capable of answering rich natural language questions and estimating its confidence in those answers at a level of the best humans at the task. Â On Feb 14-16, in an historic event, Watson triumphed over the best Jeopardy! players of all time. Â In this talk Chris Welty will discuss how Watson works and dive into some of its answers (right and wrong).
Biography: Chris Welty is a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Previously, he taught Computer Science at Vassar College, taught at and received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnice Institute, and accumulated over 14 years of teaching experience before moving to industrial research. Chris' principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the semantic web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team and, in the past, Software Engineering. Dr. Welty is a co-chair of the W3C Rules Interchange Format Working Group (RIF), serves on the steering committee of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conferences, is president of KR.ORG, on the editorial boards of AI Magazine, The Journal of Applied Ontology, and The Journal of Web Semantics, and was an editor in the W3C Web Ontology Working Group. While on sabbatical in 2000, he co-developed the OntoClean methodology with Nicola Guarino. Chris Welty's work on ontologies and ontology methodology has appeared in CACM, and numerous other publications. see:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/welty.index.html
Host: Ed Hovy ISI
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Eric Mankin
