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SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
4:00 PM - Wean Hall 7500
3:45 PM Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Hall

Christos H. Papadimitriou
C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science,
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of California at Berkeley

Games and Networks

The Internet is the first computational artifact that was not designed by a single entity, but emerged from the complex interaction of many. As a result, it must be approached as a mysterious object, akin to the universe, the brain, and the cell, to be understood by observation and falsifiable theories. The theory of games promises to play an important role in this endeavor, since the entities involved in the Internet are optimizing interacting agents in various and varying degrees of collaboration and competition.

We survey recent work by the speaker and collaborators considering the Internet and its protocols as equilibria in appropriate games, and trying to explain phenomena such as the power law distributions of the degrees of the Internet topology in terms of the complex optimization problems faced by each node.

Speaker Bio:

Christos H. Papadimitriou is the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Before Berkeley he taught at Harvard, MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, and UC San Diego. He has written four textbooks and many articles on algorithms, complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, AI, economics, and the Internet. His novel, Turing (a novel about computation),was published by MIT Press this fall. He holds a PhD from Princeton, and honorary doctorates from ETH (Zurich) and the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the ACM.

Special Note:Copies of Dr. Papadimitriou's new book will be available at the lecture.

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