Abstract:

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.

 

Short Bio: 

Aviv Zohar is a PostDoc researcher at Microsoft Research in the Silicon
Valley. He completed his PhD in computer science in the Hebrew University
under the supervision of Prof. Jeffrey Rosenschein. His research interests
include Multi-agent Systems, Game Theory, Artificial Intelligence and
Networks.