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  • MHI CommNetS seminar

    Wed, Apr 26, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Adam Wierman, Caltech

    Talk Title: Platforms & Networked Markets: Transparency & Market Power

    Series: CommNetS

    Abstract: Platforms have emerged as a powerful economic force, driving both traditional markets, like the electricity market, and emerging markets, like the sharing economy. The power of platforms comes from their ability to tame the complexities of networked marketplaces -- marketplaces where there is not a single centralized market, but instead a network of interconnected markets loosely defined by a graph of feasible exchanges. Despite the power and prominence of platforms, the workings of platforms are often guarded secrets, e.g., we know little about how amazon matches buyers and seller and how uber matches drivers and riders. Further, many competing platforms make very different design choices, but little is understood about the impact of these differing choices. In this talk, I will overview recent work that focuses on reverse engineering the design of platforms and understanding the consequences of design choices underlying modern platforms. I will use electricity markets and ridesharing services as motivating examples throughout the talk.

    Biography: Adam Wierman is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where he currently serves as Executive Officer. He is also the director of the Information Science and Technology (IST) initiative at Caltech. He is the founding director of the Rigorous Systems Research Group (RSRG) and co-Director of the Social and Information Sciences Laboratory (SISL). His research interests center around resource allocation and scheduling decisions in computer systems and services. He received the 2011 ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star award, the 2014 IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize, and has been coauthor on papers that received of best paper awards at ACM SIGMETRICS, IEEE INFOCOM, IFIP Performance (twice), IEEE Green Computing Conference, IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, and ACM GREENMETRICS. Additionally, he maintains a popular blog called Rigor + Relevance.

    Host: Prof. Insoon Yang

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

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