Computer Science Distinguished Lecture
Éva Tardos

Abstract:
Selfish behavior can often lead to suboptimal outcome for all participants, a phenomenon illustrated by many classical examples in game theory. Over the last decade we developed good understanding on how to quantify the impact of strategic user behavior on the overall performance in many games (including traffic routing as well as online auctions). In this talk we will focus on games where players use a form of learning that helps them adapt to the environment. We consider two closely related questions: what are broad classes of learning behaviors that guarantee high social welfare in games, and are these results robust to when the game or the population of players is dynamically changing and where participants have to adapt to the changing environment.

Biography:
Tardos has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is a fellow of multiple societies (ACM, AMS, SIAM, INFORMS). Dr. Tardos is also the recipient of several fellowships and awards including the Packard Fellowship, the Fulkerson Prize and the Goedel Prize. Most recently, IEEE announced that Dr. Tardos will receive the 2019 IEEE John von Neumann Medal in May for outstanding achievement in computer-related science and technology.

Éva Tardos is a Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, and she was Computer Science department chair from 2006 to 2010. She received her BA and PhD from Eötvös University in Budapest. She joined the faculty at Cornell in 1989. Tardos’s research interest is algorithms and algorithmic game theory. She is most known for her work on network-flow algorithms and quantifying the efficiency of selfish routing. She has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards including the Packard Fellowship, the Gödel Prize, Dantzig Prize, Fulkerson Prize, and the ETACS prize. She is editor editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM, has been editor-in-Chief of SIAM Journal of Computing, and editor of several other journals including Combinatorica; she served as problem committee member for many conferences, and was program committee chair for the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (1996), as well as FOCS’05, and EC’13. Most recently, IEEE announced that Dr. Tardos will receive the 2019 IEEE John von Neumann Medal in May for outstanding achievement in computer-related science and technology.