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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 NetworksThe 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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