SPEAKERS
Professor Joel Brown is an evolutionary ecologist. He asks the question:
How does natural selection acting as an optimization process determine feeding
behaviors, population characteristics, and the properties of communities? His research
includes the mathematical formulation and field tests of models and hypotheses
based on foraging theory, consumer-resource models of species coexistence, and
evolutionary game theory using the concept of evolutionary stable strategies (ESS). He uses the giving-up density approach to examine the ecology of
fear in fox squirrels, the community organization of desert granivores
in the Negev Desert, in Israel, the effects of granivory,
herbivory, and fire on prairie and applications to
the ecology of black rhinoceros, leopards preying upon blues and mountain lions
preying upon mule deer.
Professor Ravindra B. Bapat, current head of the
Delhi branch of the Indian Statistical Institute, is one
of the world's leading experts in combinatorial linear algebra with outstanding
contributions in several areas pertaining to linear algebra, matrix theory and
group theory. He got his PhD from UIC in 1980-81 under the guidance of Professor Raghavan.
In his thesis On Permanents and Diagonal
Products of Doubly Stochastic Matrices he contributed significantly to solve
the famous van der Waerden
conjecture for the permanents of doubly stochastic matrices. His monograph on
Nonnegative
Matrices and Applications with
Professor Raghavan published in 1996 contains
substantial parts of his original contributions to matrix theory including his
elegant proof of the so called Alexandroff inequality
for mixed discriminants. Cambridge University Press
has just recently brought in the same book in paperback edition. He also serves
as an Advisory Editor for the European Mathematical Society.
Professor Tamas Solymosi, from the Corvinus University of Budapest, completed his thesis
titled On
Computing the Nucleoulus for Cooperative Games in 1993 at UIC under
the supervision of Professor Raghavan. His algorithmic joint work
with Professor Raghavan to locate the nucleolus for
assignment games caught the attention of several game theorists and computer
scientists and lead to several PhD theses. He has continued his researches for
wider classes of cooperative games. He was chosen to become one of the
associate editors of the International Journal of Game Theory, the coveted
journal exclusively for game theoretic research.. His
researches in core stability and assignment games have been extensively cited
in game theory literature.
Professor Jerzy
Filar is the Foundation Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of South Australia . He did his PhD thesis (UIC 1980) under Professor Raghavan on Algorithms
for solving Undiscounted stochastic games,
contributing greatly to his first tenure track job at the Johns Hopkins University. He chose to satisfy his mothers wish to go back to
Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Mathematical
Society and also serves as Editor-in-chief of Environmental Modeling & Assessment. In 1987, Prof. Raghavan organized an
international workshop on stochastic games, here at UIC in honor of Professor L. S. Shapley. Conversations at this workshop with O J Vrieze from the University of Maastricht triggered a
fruitful collaboration that lead to their decisive book: Filar, J.A. and Vrieze, O.J. "Competitive
Markov Decision Processes - Theory, Algorithms, and Applications"
Springer-Verlag, New York, 1996. It is used as
the prescribed text book in almost all leading Universities of Europe, US and Asia. It is increasingly being used and
referred to by researchers in CS. He has supervised 15 PhDs including his most
recent - 22 year old Vietnamese student Giang T.
Nguyen - who in 2009 was the University of South Australia's youngest ever PhD
graduate.
Professor Sergiu Hart is the
current President of the Game Theory Society (2008
- 2010). He is the Kusiel-Vorreuter University
Professor at the Center for
the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He was a visiting Professor at the Department of
Economics of Stanford, and Harvard University . His researches with Mas-Colell,
the well known Economist of Harvard are known to all researchers in Game theory
and Economics. Since 1991 he is a member of the Departments of Economics and
Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was the Founding
Director of the Center for
the Study of Rationality (1991 - 1999) there. Hart was elected Fellow of
the Econometric Society (1985), was a member of the
First Council of the Game Theory Society (2000 - 2005), President of the Israel
Mathematical Union (2005 - 2006). He gave the Cowles Lecture at Yale
University (2000) and the Walras-Bowley Lecture
of the Econometric Society (2003). In 2006 he was
elected Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences
and Humanities. More than all these, Prof. Raghavan
admires his notion of potential for cooperative games and its connections to Shapley value and his deep insights into correlated equilibria, evolutionary equilibria
and non-cooperative approaches to arriving at the Shapley
value , all of which are cherished by the entire game theoretic community.
Professor
Hubert Chin was Prof. Raghavan`s very first Ph.D advisee from, UIC. His
1973 thesis was titled Some Contributions
to the Structure of Equilibrium Points in N Person Non-cooperative Games.
The thesis essentailly appeared as joint work with Parthasarathy and Raghavan in
International J Game theory (1974). While it was a cooperative effort, Prof. Raghavan happily says that the basic ideas of the proof the
main theorem (Every completely mixed 3
person game with 2 pure strategies for each player has exactly one Nash
equilibrium point) is essentially the work of Chin. This is one of the
first theorem of its kind in game theory that used
combinatorial reductions to settle the theorem for 793 cases individually. His
interests were always on applications of game theory to industry and thus for
many years he was game theory researcher at Grumman`s
Corporation.
Dr. Zamir Syed. After Filar`s algorithmic work in stochastic games the major
algorithmic contribution to Stochastic games is by Zamir
Syed. He did his Ph.D here
at UIC under the supervision of Prof. Raghavan, and has also collaborated with Prof. Filar. His joint work with Prof. Raghavan
on algorithms for discounted stochastic games of perfect information,
solved the 50 year old problem in Game theory and algorithmic research. He
chose to join industry and his first job was at the think tank of Goldman
Sachs, the reputed investment firm where, currently, he is the Portfolio
manager of Trans Market group, obviously dealing with millions of dollars!
Professor Piotr
Gmitrasiewicz is an associate professor at the Department of
Computer Science, here at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research
centers around the notion of rationality in artificial intelligent agents. In
his work, the main issues are how agents should decide what actions to execute
to coordinate with anticipated actions of the other agents, and how they should
decide what communicative actions to engage in. A related problem is that of a
theoretical framework for representing knowledge and belief of agents
interacting with other agents. His other work includes evolution of agent
communication languages, frameworks for representing uncertain knowledge about
the environment evolving in time, the notions of time pressure and the value of
time, and rational behavior and trade-offs under time pressure. He is also
interested in decision-theoretic approaches to game theory, operations
research, philosophies of agenthood, and in
applications of rational autonomous agents in realistic distributed domains.
Professor
Evangelista Fe. As a strong analyst, she chose to work on existence theorems
for stochastic games, here at UIC. In 1994,
she submitted her thesis on Equilibrium
in Bimatrix Games and in Repeated Games with Additive
Reward and Transition under the guidance of Professor Raghavan.
The main theorem of her thesis appeared in a special volume honoring Professor
David Blackwell, the renowned statistician, set theorist and game theorist,
edited by Shapley and Ferguson.
Her theorem with Raghavan on the extreme points of
Correlated equilibria in bimatrix
games was greatly appreciated by Nobel Laureate Professor Aumann
in his plenary address at the UIC Workshop
on Game Theory in 1994. With her commitment to Philippino
values and traditions, she chose to take up a simpler teaching position at the University
of Wisconsin at White water where
she is an associate professor.