Natural language research announcements

["Alexandre Klementiev" <klementi AT uiuc.edu>]

Just a reminder that we will have a speaker at the AIIS seminar tomorrow (see below); the student meeting with Itai is scheduled for 2pm in 3403 SC.

Alex.

On Nov 12, 2007 4:36 PM, Alexandre Klementiev < klementi AT uiuc.edu> wrote:

Dear faculty and students,

Itai Ashlagi will give a talk (details below) at the AIIS seminar this Thursday. If you would like to meet with Itai, please let me know.

Thank you,
Alex

Title: Mediators in Position Auctions
Speaker: Itai Ashlagi, Technion, Israel
Date: Nov. 15, 4:30pm
Location: Siebel 4405

Abstract:

A mediator is a reliable entity, which plays on behalf of the players who give her the right of play. The mediator is guaranteed to behave in a pre-specified way based on messages received from the agents.

However, a mediator can not enforce behavior; that is, agents can play in the game directly without the mediator's help.  A mediator generates a new game for the players, the mediated game. The outcome in the original game of an equilibrium in the mediated game is called a mediated equilibrium.

Monderer and Tennenholtz defined a mediator for games with complete information. We extend the theory of mediators to games with incomplete information, and use the new theory to study position auctions, a central topic in practical and theoretical electronic commerce. We provide minimal sets of conditions on position auctions, which are sufficient to guarantee that the VCG outcome function is a mediated equilibrium in these position auctions.

Bio:

Itai Ashlagi is a PhD student in Operations Research at the faculty of industrial engineering and management at the Technion, Israel.

The PhD is done under the supervision of Dov Monderer and Moshe Tennenholtz (graduation in August 2008).

In his dissertation, titled "Pre-Bayseian Games", Itai studies games with strict incomplete information.