October 11-15, Santorini-GREECE

http://www.cti.gr/AAGTLSN/

SUPPORTED BY
   

About the school

The school is co-organized by the Research Academic Computer Technology Institute and the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the  Technical University of Crete. It aims to bring together distinguished scientists in algorithmic game theory and young researchers interested in algorithmic aspects of game theory with emphasis on issues emerging in large scale technological networks, like the Internet.

Scope

Internet is a new platform of complex interactions among distinct entities, possibly of conflicting economical interests, such as network or service providers, and simple network users. The guiding rules of this kind of coexistence and interaction were based for quite a long time on the assumption that the participating entities act in such a way that the social profit of the whole system is maximized. But this assumption is nowadays considered to be far from realistic. Different entities compete against each other, or create coalitions for their own common profit and sometimes against other entities. The network authorities that rule Internet are guided by competitive, or even conflicting economical interests. Additionally, under the pretense of the reality of increasing marginal costs, it is rather likely that these network authorities will introduce charges for many of the elementary network services (eg, email transfer and automatic data propagation) whose costs are collectively absorbed today in an effective and widely acceptable way.

Under these circumstances, it is anticipated that all the participating entities of Internet will demonstrate an even more aggressive and egoistic behavior, while at the same time it is also possible that they will attempt to violate or deceive the communication protocols for their own profit. This necessitates the design and subsequent deployment of methods, techniques, algorithms or protocols, whose aim will be to streamline the egoistic behavior of individual entities towards the maximization of common good, in a non-imperative way -- a way that could even be envisioned to be free of the shortcomings of today's prevalent self-regulating mechanism in man-made systems, that of a market.

Finally, a crucial aspect is the time evolution of Internet. Individuals, starting from initial beliefs about the status of the whole system, keep adapting their beliefs according to some kind of feedback they get, or even through a kind of natural selection. Such scenarios depict the spread of a virus in a large network, the prevalence of a new communication protocol among the network authorities, or a new product among the end users, etc.

All these socio-economic considerations concerning Internet sum up to a very important challenge: The suggestion of new models representing the consequences of egoistic behavior of entities that administrate and/or exploit large scale information networks. This new challenge calls for new methodologies that depart from classical areas such as Logic and Discrete Mathematics and mainly emanate from (evolutionary or classic) Game Theory and Micro-Economics. The major objectives of such a challenge are:

• The assessment of fixed points that may emerge for the whole system, with specific properties (eg, equilibria of static or repeated games among rational players in large scale networks).

• The efficient construction of one or all possible fixed points for a given instance.

• The provision of guidelines to the network designer who is mainly concerned about the ‘‘social profit’’ of the whole system, so as to avoid some undesirable fixed points of prohibitive cost (this approach is usually called Inverse Game Theory).

• The design of mechanisms that force the participants of the system to contribute in a sincere interaction.

• The evolutionary behavior of populations in large scale information networks. In this case we assume that the participants follow a stepwise adaptation of their behavior, through individual learning or natural selection. That is, we substitute the concept of rational players with that of population dynamics.

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Target Group

This school aims at graduate students and junior researchers interested in algorithmics of game theory, with emphasis on large scale networks. The main goal is the presentation by distinguished lecturers of the major techniques and methodologies for studying the above mentioned issues.

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List of Distinguished Lecturers

• Costas Courcoubetis (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece).
  Title of lectures: Economic Aspects of P2P Systems.
  Accompanying material: Slides.
   

• Elias Koutsoupias (University of Athens, Greece).
  Title of lectures: Introduction to Coordination Mechanisms.
  Accompanying material: Slides (PART I and PART II).
   

• Matteo Marsili (ITCP, Trieste, Italy)
  Title of lectures: Statistical mechanics of heterogeneous interacting adaptive agents.
  Accompanying material: Slides.
  
   

• Marios Mavronicolas (University of Cyprus).
  Title of lectures: Discrete Routing Games over a Simple Non-Cooperative Network.
  Accompanying material: Survey Paper.
   

• Noam Nisan (Hebrew University, Israel)
  Title of lectures: Introduction to Combinatorial Auctions.
  Accompanying material: Slides.
   

• Berthold Vöcking (University of Dortmund, Germany).
  Title of lectures: Selfish Routing and Congestion Games: Towards a Game-Based Analysis of the Internet.
  Accompanying material: Slides.

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Registration Information

The registration cost for the school is 300 euros and covers the participation to the school, the expenses for the accompanying material and coffee/snack breaks and lunches, but does not include the accommodation. A registration form is provided either in PDF format or in PS format. Please fill in the form and send it to the postal address mentioned in the form. The registration form must be accompanied by a detailed curriculum vitae, as well as a recommendation letter by a distinguished scientist (eg, thesis advisor for students). For further information please contact us.  The closing date for sending your registration applications is September 13, 2004. The candidates will be notified until September 19, 2004.

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Student Grants

The organizing committee supports a limited number of grants that aim to help mainly students participate in the school. Therefore, there will be up to 5 full grants (ie, registration + accommodation) for students coming from long distance (priority will be given to students out of Europe, due to their large travel expenses) and up to 5 registration grants (ie, covering the registration fee). The selection process will start on Monday September 13, when the committee will have all the participation applications at hand.

Please note that even when applying for a grant, the typical registration procedure has to be followed. Please do not forget to check the corresponding information concerning your interest for a grant in the registration form that you send.

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Travel and Accommodation Information

The school will be hosted at Santorini Image Hotel, in town Messaria of the greek island Santorini, on October 11-15, 2004. Santorini is accessible from Athens either by a direct flight (from El. Venizelos airport), or by boat from the port of Pireas. For more travel and accommodation information, as well as for reserving rooms online, please click here.

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Organizing Committee

• Scott Kirkpatrick, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ISRAEL.

• Lefteris Kirousis, Computer Engineering & Informatics Department, Polytechnics School at University of Patra, GREECE.

• Spyros Kontogiannis, Computer Science Department, University of Ioannina, GREECE; Research Academic Computer Technology Institute.

• Manolis Koubarakis, Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, GREECE.

• Paul Spirakis (chair), Computer Engineering & Informatics Department, Polytechnics School at the University of Patra, GREECE; director of the Research Academic Computer Technology Institute.

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Schedule of the Lectures

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Sponsorships

The school is sponsored by

• the Greek Ministry of Education (http://www.ypepth.gr/),

• the European Projects DELIS (Dynamically Evolving Large Scale Information Systems, http://delis.uni-paderborn.de/) and EVERGROW (Ever-growing global scale-free networks, their provisioning, repair and unique functions, http://www.evergrow.org/),

• the R&D of the Research Academic Computer Technology Institute (http://www.cti.gr/).

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