Michael Wooldridge is arguably one of the world’s most known experts in intelligent agents. He is one of the most cited authors in the field, the recipient of the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2006 and the recipient of the ERC Advanced Grant in 2011.
For more information about Michael Wooldridge’s Distinguished Lecture in Computer Science, please scroll below.
Date of the talk: December 14, 2011, at 3.00 pm, in room 308 (Huxley Building, 180 Queens’ Gate), followed by a drinks reception in DoC Common Room and then the DoC Christmas Party in room 344
Speaker: Michael Wooldridge http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~mjw/
Title: Playing Games with Games Abstract: The past decade has been witness to a huge explosion of interest in the computational aspects of game theory. One topic that has received much attention is that of mechanism design. Crudely, mechanism design can be understood as the problem of designing games so that, if every player in the game acts rationally, certain desirable outcomes will result. In mechanism design, it is usually assumed that the designer of the mechanism has complete freedom to design a mechanism as desired. But this is not the reality of most real-world mechanism design problems: when a Government develops a new law, for example, they do not usually have a blank slate, but must start from the framework of society as it exists. In this talk, I will present work we have done on the computational aspects of such “mechanism design for legacy systems”. In the settings we will consider here, a principal external to a system must try to engineer a mechanism to influence the system so that certain desirable outcomes will result from the rational action of agents within the system. We focus specifically on the possibility of imposing taxation schemes upon a system, so that the preferences of participants are perturbed in such a way that they collectively and rationally choose socially desirable outcomes. The specific framework within which we express these ideas is a framework known as Boolean games. We discuss the computational complexity of the “implementation” problem for Boolean games, and derive a formal characterisation of feasible implementation problems for such games. If time permits, we will discuss extensions to the framework that take it much closer to contemporary CAV models, and will briefly survey some of the problems that arise in these richer settings, which will be studied in a 5-year ERC Advanced Grant, awarded in October 2011.
Speaker’s bio: Michael Wooldridge is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has been active in multi-agent systems research since 1989, and has published over two hundred articles in the area. His main interests are in the use of formal methods for reasoning about autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Wooldridge was the recipient of the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2006. He is an associate editor of the journals “Artificial Intelligence” and “Journal of AI Research (JAIR)”. His introductory textbook “An Introduction to Multiagent Systems” was published by Wiley in 2002 (Chinese translation 2003; Greek translation 2008; second edition 2009). In October 2011, he was awarded a 5-year ERC Advanced Grant entitled “RACE — Reasoning about Computational Economies”.