Events Calendar

CS Colloquium Series: Dr Pradeep Varakantham: Multi-Agent Systems for improving Quality of Life in Urban Environments

Speaker: Dr Pradeep Varakantham, Singapore Management University

Talk Title: Multi-Agent Systems for improving Quality of Life in Urban Environments

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: In this talk, I will present our research on large scale multi-agent systems for improving quality of life in urban cities of today. Technically, we focus on problems of allocating resources to multiple agents in cooperative, selfish or adversarial settings, while considering different objectives, e.g., maximizing revenue or utility, minimizing energy consumption or wait times, etc. We have provided generic solutions to these problems that are at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (Planning and Scheduling), Game Theory, Behavioral Economics and Optimization. Finally, we have demonstrated the utility of our techniques in the context of applications in:

(a) Transportation: By developing extensions to the well known Congestion Games model to account for involuntary movements of taxi drivers (dictated by customer movement) and providing scalable mechanisms for solving the new representation, we optimized taxi fleet operations of a major taxi company (more than 8000 taxis) with respect to revenue of taxi drivers and availability of taxis.

(b) Leisure/Entertainment: By exploiting network structure and limited impact of each individual patron's movement, our work builds on reward sharing games and orienteering problems to minimize wait times for individual patrons at large theme parks. This was demonstrated on a well known theme park in Singapore.

(c) Energy: In conserving energy at office buildings, we proposed new approaches for scheduling meetings that are based on exploiting flexibility of individual participants. By analyzing 32k meeting requests, studying user behaviors w.r.t providing flexibility in meeting requests and exploiting the flexibility, we predicted a potential benefit of 17k$ annually at one of the buildings in University of Southern California with our approach.

(d) Security: Based on using Stackelberg Games, we have developed approaches to compute randomized patrolling strategies for protecting the rail networks in many large cities of today. This was demonstrated on Singapore rail network that consists of more than 100 stations spread over 7 lines.

Biography: Pradeep Varakantham received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and he was a post doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Currently, he serves as assistant professor at Singapore Management University, where he teaches advanced topics in intelligent decision support, which includes techniques on distributed problem solving; planning/scheduling; and game-theoretic approaches. He is author or co-author of more than 40 international publications and has served as co-chair of the International Workshop on Multiagent Sequential Decision Making under Uncertainty in 2007 and 2008, and also the AAAI Symposium on Multi-Agent Coordination under Uncertainty in 2011. He has also served on the program committee of most major conferences (AAMAS, AAAI, ICAPS, IJCAI) and reviewers at most major journals (JAIR, AIJ, JAAMAS) in Artficial Intelligence . He was nominated for best senior program committee member at AAMAS'13 and one of his papers was nominated for best student paper at AAMAS'09.

Host: Milind Tambe

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair