EE Seminar: Computing with Strategic Agents and Uncertainty
(The talk will be given in English)
Speaker: Dr. Inbal Talgam Cohen
School of Computer Science & Engineering, Hebrew University
Monday, December 12th, 2016
15:00 - 16:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering
Computing with Strategic Agents and Uncertainty
Abstract
A centralized algorithm with perfect information can reach an efficient solution in engineering applications such as network routing, allocation of wireless spectrum, or matching jobs to machines on the cloud. Modern engineering and economic algorithms, though, face more demanding settings - algorithm input is not fully specified and the algorithm must interact with self-interested agents (for example, users with traffic demands in a communication network). In these cases, algorithm design faces new and fundamental challenges.
In this talk I will demonstrate how my research tackles these challenges, using ideas from combinatoric optimization, probability, game theory and economics. A particularly powerful idea for aligning agents’ incentives, which is heavily used in practice, is pricing (for example, consider for-profit cloud computing services). I will discuss algorithmic pricing questions that have been open for over three decades, and how these “reduce” to well-understood and classic resource allocation problems by applying a resource augmentation approach [Sleator-Tarjan’84].
Bio
Inbal Talgam-Cohen is a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at HUJI and a visiting postdoctoral researcher at TAU. She holds a PhD from Stanford (2015) supervised by Tim Roughgarden, an MSc from Weizmann and a BSc from TAU in computer science, as well as a law LLB. Her research is in algorithms and computational complexity with applications to game theory. Her awards include Best Doctoral Dissertation Award of ACM SIGecom, the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, and the Best Student Paper Award at EC’15.
