[Colloquium] TTI-C Distinguished Lecturer Michael Kearns Tomorrow (4/28/06)

[Katherine Cumming]

**********TTI-C Distinguished Lecturer***********
                                  April 28, 2006
        Presented by:  Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
 
 
Speaker:  Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania
Speaker's home page:  http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/
 
Date: Friday, April 28, 2006 
Location: Ryerson 251   Part of TTI-C Distinguished Lecturer Series
Time:  3:00 pm
Refreshments to follow: Ryerson 255
 
Title:   Behavioral Graph Coloring
Abstract:
The pioneering work of Travers and Milgram in 1969 established the
now-familiar folklore of "six degrees" of separation in natural social
networks.  More recently, researchers including Jon Kleinberg and Duncan
Watts have explored the algorithmic aspects of how messages are forwarded in
such networks.  Perhaps the computer science view of this fascinating line
of thought can be best summarized as follows: Using relatively local
information, distributed human organizations can compute good approximations
to the all-pairs shortest paths problem.  What other sorts of distributed
optimization problems can humans networks solve?
 
In this talk, I will describe the preliminary but thought-provoking findings
of a series of behavioral experiments we have been performing at Penn. Human
subjects attempt to perform distributed graph coloring using a system that
controls network structure, information conditions, incentives, and a
variety of other variables of interest.  The experiments shed early light on
whether such problems can be solved by human networks, under what
conditions, and on what algorithms they seem to adopt.
 
Joint work with Siddharth Suri and Nick Montfort. 
 
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If you have questions, or would like to meet the speaker, please contact
Katherine at 773-834-1994 or  <mailto:kcumming at tti-c.org> kcumming at tti-c.org

For information on future TTI-C talks and events, please go to the TTI-C
Events page:  http://www.tti-c.org/events.html.  TTI-C (1427 East 60th
Street, Chicago, IL  60637)
 
 
 
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