Events Calendar

Computing Game-Theoretic Solutions

Speaker: Prof. Vincent Conitzer, Duke University
Host: Prof. Milind TambeAbstract:
Computer scientists are increasingly confronted with settings where multiple self-interested parties (humans or software agents) interact, especially in the context of the Internet. Examples include auctions, exchanges, elections, and other negotiation protocols, as well as job scheduling, routing, and webpage ranking. In these settings, the optimal course of action for one agent generally depends on what the other agents do, resulting in a tricky circularity. Game theory provides various notions of how agents should act in such domains. However, especially from an AI perspective, these concepts become useful only when we can compute the solutions that they prescribe. In this talk, I will review several standard game-theoretic solution concepts, including dominance, iterated dominance, Nash equilibrium, and Stackelberg strategies. I will also discuss algorithms and complexity results for computing these solutions.Biography:
Vincent Conitzer is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Economics at Duke University. He received Ph.D. (2006) and M.S. (2003) degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and an A.B. (2001) degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. His research focuses on computational aspects of microeconomics, in particular game theory, mechanism design, voting/social choice, and auctions. This work uses techniques from, and includes applications to, artificial intelligence and multiagent systems. Conitzer received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2008), an Honorable Mention for the 2007 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the 2006 IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award, the AAMAS Best Program Committee Member Award (2006), and an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship (2005). He is a co-author on papers that received a AAAI-08 Outstanding Paper Award and the AAMAS-08 Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award.

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Colloquia