Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

As I met various people from my alma mater LUMS , one thing which came up in conversations was the  demise of Prof. Zaeem Jafri, a well known mathematics instructor at LUMS. The university human resource department recollected his profile : After successfully achieving two MSc degrees in Physics and Electronics Technology, respectively in 1980, he went on to pursue a PhD. in Micro-Electronics from the University of Surrey in United Kingdom. He joined LUMS on July 12, 2000. Dr. Zaeem Jafri was working at LUMS as an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics along with performing the duties of the Director of the Office of Student Affairs. At LUMS he taught several courses including: (a) Theory and Applications of Science (b) Calculus (c) Foundations of Electronics (d) Foundations of Physics.    Besides his affiliation with LUMS, Dr. Zaeem Jafri’s career involved teaching experience at various notable educational institutes. This was Dr. Jafri t...

The next BCTCS (British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science) will be held from 6th to 9th April in 2010. The colloquium has an impressive list of invited speakers: Erik Demaine (MIT) Johan Håstad (KTH Stockholm) Gil Kalai (HU Jerusalem) Kim Guldstrand Larsen (Aalborg) Catuscia Palamidessi (INRIA / École Polytechnique) Ulrike Sattler (Manchester)

I was notified of an interesting satellite workshop of the AAMAS conference. The workshop is on Cooperative Games in Multiagent Systems and is focused on cooperative games, coalition formation, negotiation and market and economics based cooperation.

Details here . 

I just returned from a research visit to TU Delft . My hosts were Tomas Klos , Cees Witteveen, Mathijs de Weerdt  and Yingqian Zhang. They are a part of an applied algorithms group with an increasing interest in game theory and mechanism design. It was great making some new contacts and getting feedback on some recent research. I received an award winning  Senz umbrella as a gift. The umbrella has been designed by people from TU Delft. The visit coincided with an MSc thesis defence of Bart de Keijzer who finished an excellent thesis . The main contribution of the thesis was identifying some structural properties of the lattice of canonical weighted voting games and enumerating them. This helps give exact solutions to designing weighted voting games with specific properties like minimum distance from a target power index vector. Congratulations Bart! The trip also gave me an opportunity to visit Amsterdam and meet up with Michiel, a friend i hadn't met in fo...

The latest volume of Economic Theory is based on a symposium organized by Prof von Stengel a while ago. The volume is totally focused on algorithmic techniques for the computation of Nash equlibria in finite games. It includes a well written and accessible  overview by Tim Roughgarden on the relevant computational complexity concepts for equilibrium computation.