Invited Talks

 

Invited Talk 1

Name of the Speaker: Nidhi Hegde, Technicolor's Paris Research Center
Title: Content Curation Games in Social Networks
Abstract:
Social networks offer users new means of accessing information, essentially relying on ``social filtering'', i.e. propagation and filtering of information by social contacts. The sheer amount of data flowing in these networks, combined with the limited budget of attention of each user, makes it difficult to ensure that social filtering brings relevant content to the interested users.  I will present two perspectives on filtering, or curating, of relevant content under a limited budget of attention.

First, I will consider how users may self-organize their connections to receive content of interest to them.  To this end I will introduce flow games, a simple abstraction that models network formation under selfish user dynamics, featuring user-specific interests and budget of attention.

Second, I will consider curating of a user's personal stream when sourced from aggregators.  Here I will use the framework of utility games to demonstrate the efficiency of incentive-based curation mechanisms.

Biography: Nidhi Hegde is a senior researcher at Technicolor's Paris Research Center.  She completed her B.Sc in Biochemistry at the University of Alberta, Canada in 1995, and received her M.S and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1998 and 2000 respectively.  She has worked at Bell Labs (New Jersey, USA) on wireless networks,  at INRIA (Sophia-Antipolis, France), CWI and EURANDOM (The Netherlands) on models of performance analysis.  She was a researcher at France Telecom R&D from 2005-2010 where she developed models for network dimensioning and wireless scheduling.  She has been at Technicolor since 2010 and has been working on control in the smart grid, analysis of social networks for information dissemination and privacy-preserving mechanisms for user data.

Invited Talk 2

Name of the Speaker: N. Viswanadham, Indian Institute of Science
Title: Structural Holes and Smart Business Network Orchestration
Abstract
Our focus in this lecture is on fusion of the fields of social networks and business  networks to obtain useful new results. In particular, we focus on architectures for Governance, Coordination and Control of global business networks borrowing the concepts from social network theory. The task of governance of a network can be split in three parts: selection of partner companies, determination of the most effective form of the relationship among the selected partner companies and finally monitoring and execution of the agreed delivery schedules. We present our approach to business network orchestration.  We present examples from manufacturing supply chains, service value networks and public delivery networks such as food security.

Biography: N. Viswanadham is INSA Senior Scientist in the  Computer Science and Automation at the Indian Institute of Science. He was until recent INAE Distinguished Professor at IISc. Professor N. Viswanadham was Professor and Executive Director for The Center of Excellence Global Logistics And Manufacturing Strategies in the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India during 2006-2011. He was Deputy Executive Director of The Logistics Institute-Asia Pacific and also Professor in Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering at the National University of Singapore during 1998-2005. He was a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore from 1967-1998.He was Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Automation from 1990-96 and Chairman of Electrical Sciences Division from 97-98. He was Tata Chemical Chair Professor from 1992-97.

He is the recipient of the 1996 IISc Alumni award for excellence in research. He was conferred the Distinguished Alumni Award in the year 2009 by the Council of the Indian Institute of Science. He was selected for the 2012 Prof S K Mitra Memorial Award by the Indian National Academy of Engineering.

N. Viswanadham is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Academy of Engineering, and Third World Academy of Sciences.

He is a member of the advisory board of the Engineering Systems and Design pillar of Singapore University of Technology and Design. He is the Chief Editor for Sadhana, the Academy proceedings for Engineering Sciences.

Professor Viswanadham has made significant contributions to the areas manufacturing, logistics and global supply chain networks.  He is the author of four textbooks, nine edited volumes, over two hundred articles in top tier journal and conferences. He is the lead author of widely-used and comprehensive textbook Performance Modelling of Automated Manufacturing Systems published by Prentice Hall, USA, in 1992. This book is reprinted several times in various countries and is still the book of choice of students and teachers. He authored a book on manufacturing enterprises in 1999. His recent  book Ecosystem Aware Global Supply Chain Management , published by World Scientific in 2013,addresses path breaking methodologies for redesign of global supply chains integrating performance, risk, innovation and coordination and execution. He has written several thought leadership papers on logistics, manufacturing, services in India, some of them are sponsored by CII and FICCI and most of them are published by industry magazines.
His current research efforts are on Global supply/service chain networks, Green supply chain design, Food security in India and Smart village development.

Invited Talk 3

Name of the Speaker: David C. Parkes, Harvard University
Title: Robust Peer Prediction

Abstract:
Many platforms need to promote users to invest effort in submitting accurate opinions; e.g., online product-rating platforms,  votes on content curated on crowdsourcing platforms, and peer grading in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Frequently, it is important to align incentives towards informative inputs without access to gold standard answers. Peer prediction looks to address this problem by leveraging correlations between reports to make payments that promote effort and accuracy. However, classical solutions either require too much knowledge on the part of the mechanism designer or are otherwise fragile. In this talk, I will describe progress that we have made in the past few years on making peer prediction mechanisms more robust and better suited to practice.

This is joint work with Jens Witkowski.

Biography: David C. Parkes is Harvard College Professor, George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science, and Area Dean for Computer Science at Harvard University, where he leads research at the interface between economics and computer science, with a focus on electronic commerce, artificial intelligence and machine learning and founded the EconCS research group. Parkes received his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, and an M. Eng. in Engineering and Computing Science from Oxford University in 1995. Parkes has served as Program Chair of ACM EC'07 and AAMAS'08, General Chair of ACM EC'10, and General Chair of WINE 2013. Parkes is co Program Chair of HCOMP 14, and serves as the Chair of ACM SIGecom, an Editor of Games and Economic Behavior, and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation, and the INFORMS Journal of Computing.