Games, Algorithms, and the Internet




Christos Papadimitriou

C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of California at Berkeley

Huang Engineering Center, Room 300
Stanford University
Friday, November 12, 2010

Abstract

The advent of the Internet brought parallel paradigm shifts to both Economics and Computer Science. Computer scientists realized that large-scale performing systems can emerge from the interaction of selfish agents, while economists saw that the default platforms of economic transactions are computational and interconnected. Algorithmic Game Theory is a subdiscipline that emerged from this turmoil, revisiting some of the most important problems in Economics and Game Theory from a computational and network perspective. This talk will survey some of the major results and challenges in this decade-old field.

Speaker Bio

Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1996, Papadimitriou taught at Harvard, MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, and the University of California, San Diego. He has written four textbooks and many articles on algorithms, complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, AI, economics, and the Internet. He holds a PhD from Princeton, and honorary doctorates from ETH (Zurich) and the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki). In 2002 Christos Papadimitriou won the 5th Knuth Prize for longstanding and seminal contributions to the foundations of computer science. In 2008 he won the Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the ACM.

In addition to his scientific pursuits, Dr. Papadimitriou has written a novel, Turing, which is both a romance and a history of ideas in computer science, and coauthored the graphic novel Logicomix, which tells the story of the early-20th-Century search for a logical foundation for mathematics.

9.16.2010 dmm