[Colloq] Hiring Talk reminder

Diane Keys diane at ccs.neu.edu
Mon Mar 19 10:01:24 EDT 2007


College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents a Hiring Talk By:
Nicole Immorlica
Microsoft Research

Who will speak on:
Algorithmic Game Theory with Applications to Online Auctions

Monday, March 19, 2007
10:30 am
366 West Village H
Northeastern University

Abstract:
Since its inception in the 1980s, the popularity of the Internet has
been growing exponentially, resulting in a mass of shared knowledge and
fast, cheap communication. Hand-in-hand with these developments, we have
seen the birth of a plethora of new systems for facilitating interaction
among economic agents from marketplaces like eBay and Google's AdWords
to online networking services like MySpace and Match.com.  These systems
give rise to numerous opportunities for scientific exploration, and such
studies are fundamental to the future economic and social success of
these systems.

Algorithmic game theory is a new paradigm for studying such systems.
The goal in this field is to understand the behavior of autonomous
selfish agents, and to define rules that encourage them to collectively
act in a way that optimizes some system objective such as social welfare
or revenue. In this talk, I will first present an overview of some basic
notions of algorithmic game theory and survey some important
applications of the field.  I will then proceed to showcase some
techniques from this field through the problem of online auction design,
or auctions for bidders who arrive and depart over time (e.g.
Priceline.com).  Maximizing welfare in such auctions is complicated by
the fact that bids must be accepted or rejected at the moment they are
submitted.  It is known how the classic secretary problem introduced by
Dynkin in 1963 can be used to design approximately welfare-maximizing
auctions in a simple multi-unit auction setting.  We show how the
classic secretary problem can be generalized to a combinatorial setting
where acceptable sets form a matroid, and use this generalization to
build mechanisms for a class of online combinatorial auctions.

Parts of this talk are based on joint work with Moshe Babaioff and
Robert Kleinberg.

Bio:
Nicole Immorlica received her Ph.D. in June 2005 from MIT and has since
been a postdoctoral researcher at the Theory Group in Microsoft
Research.  Her research interests lie in applying techniques from the
field of theoretical computer science to problems at the forefront of
economics and computer science.  Her recent research has focused on
auction design, particularly sponsored search auctions; matching markets
such as the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP); and the
formation and diffusion of information in social networks.

Host: Professor Jay Aslam


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