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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 17 December 2003, vol. 19:16
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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17 December 2003 Stanford Vol. 19, No. 16
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
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ACTIVITIES FROM 17 DECEMBER 2003 TO 19 DECEMBER 2003
THURSDAY, 18 DECEMBER 2003
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
"Beyond Mechanism Design: Competitive Safety Analysis and
K-Implementation"
Moshe Tennenholtz
Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wainwrig/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm Fundamental Themes in Neuroscience Seminar
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"The Nature of Nurture: Insights from Analysis of Brain
Immediate Early Genes"
Paul Worley
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Department of Neuroscience
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
7:00pm SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
"The Impact of Future Technology on Society"
John Gage
Sun Microsystems
http://www.sdforum.org/
(there is a fee)
Abstract below
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Stanford Blood Center status: Shortage of O-, A+, A-, and AB-. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
December has many traditions, one of them is that fewer people
donate. Change the tradition if you are qualified to give blood.
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ANNOUNCEMENT
Since CSLI will be closed down for the break, the next CSLI Calendar
will be during the week of January 5, 2004. Enjoys the holidays.
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UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 18 December 2003, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wainwrig/cis-seminar
"Beyond Mechanism Design:
Competitive Safety Analysis and K-Implementation"
Moshe Tennenholtz
Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology
The study of multi-agent systems with self-motivated agents has become
a basic ingredient of work in CS and AI. Much of this work adopts a
"systems perspective": the design of protocols for non-cooperative
computational environments. This line of research can be viewed as
part of economic mechanism design, a branch of economics and game
theory that deals with the design of games for obtaining desired
outcomes. However, in most cases we do not design games from scratch,
and the agent faces the challenge of selecting the right action in a
given game. Moreover, even if there exists a reliable party that may
wish to influence the behavior of agents in a given game, she cannot
in most cases change the rules of the games or enforce behaviors and
payments by the agents. This talk introduces the theory of competitive
safety analysis and the theory of K-implementation, addressing the
above challenges. The first part of this talk introduces competitive
safety analysis. We show that (somewhat surprisingly) safety-level
strategies, where an agent aims to optimize its worst case payoff, and
therefore does not rely on other agents' rationality, can lead to an
expected payoff that is close to the one obtained in Nash
equilibrium. This is shown both for simple abstract games, as well as
for a general load balancing setting. The second part of this talk
introduces K-implementation. In K-implementation, a reliable
interested party (who can make credible offers for conditional
monetary transfers to the agents), who cannot enforce behaviors and/or
payments by the agents, and can not change the rules of interaction,
attempts to lead rational agents to adopting desired behaviors. The
agents are assumed to use only "minimal" rationality considerations
(i.e. they will not use dominated strategies) and the interested party
wishes to minimize its expenses. We show that a reliable interested
party can make any Nash equilibrium into a dominant strategy with 0
cost! The latter is true for general games with complete information,
as well as for any frugal VCG mechanism.
Joint work with Dov Monderer.
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SDFORUM DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SERIES
on Thursday, 18 December 2003, 6:00pm (talk starts at 7:00pm)
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.sdforum.org/
($10 in advance for preregistered members of SDForum and co-hosting
organizations, $20 otherwise ($15/$25 at the door)
"The Impact of Future Technology on Society"
John Gage
Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems
About the speaker: One of the founders of Sun Microsystems, John Gage
is responsible for Sun's relationships with world scientific and
technical organizations, and for public policy and governmental
relations relating to science and technology.
In 1995, Gage created NetDay, a volunteer project to connect all
schools and libraries to the Internet.
Gage has served and continues to serve on numerous boards and advisory
panels, including those for the National Library of Medicine,
FermiLabs, NetDay, Schools On Line, The Markle Foundation Task Force
on National Security, and the United States Institute for Peace. He is
a frequent keynote speaker at industry and public policy conferences
around the world.
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END MATERIAL
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