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December 21, Wednesday
12:00 – 13:00

Challenges in Multi-Agent Systems: Bitcoin, Social Networks, P2P Communities, and Network Protocols
Computer Science seminar
Lecturer : Aviv Zohar
Lecturer homepage : http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/avivz/
Affiliation : Microsoft Research
Location : 202/37
Host : Dr. Aryeh Kontorovich
The age of the internet and the pervasiveness of networked computing enabled the creation of large computational systems in which multiple autonomous entities interact. The designers of such systems face difficult challenges: they must bring about the desired behavior of the system as a whole while accounting for the disjoint behavior and incentives of individual agents. I will present a few examples of research (with various collaborators) that deals with these challenges in the context of different systems. I will discuss recent work on incentives for information dissemination in the Bitcoin protocol (a distributed electronic currency that has received much attention recently) and in social networks, as well as work on the interactions within closed P2P communities, and on core network protocols such as TCP and BGP.