Speaker: Dr. Ioannis Stavrakakis, Professor and Dept. Head, Advanced Networking Research (ANR) Group Department of Informatics & Telecommunications, University of Athens, Greece Home Page: http://www.di.uoa.gr/~ioannis/

Title: Managing competition for (public) resources: Decision-making and some congestion cost cutting approaches

Abstract:
Advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled the generation and dissemination of unprecedented amounts of information that enhance awareness about the environment and its (limited) resources. While awareness can bring benefits, it also intensifies competition and the associated congestion penalties (price of anarchy) in distributed, uncoordinated environments. Some of the resulting challenges and side-issues are discussed in this talk through rigorous formulations, alternative approaches, as well as through case studies on the parking spot (limited) resource selection in a city. 

In the first part, the uncoordinated (congestion penalty inducing) resource selection problem is considered. Strategic (rational) users are considered first, to set the benchmark under full rationality and rich information availability. As information may be incomplete or decision makers may have computational, cognitive or other limitations or biases, alternative decision making under bounded rationality is explored, as a more relevant to the particular environment, including heuristics-based (fast and frugal); some interesting less is more phenomena are observed.  In the second part, two approaches are briefly discussed in an effort to bring in some coordination and reduce the congestion penalties. The first is ICT technology-assisted and coordinates the passing of the resources from one user-subscriber to another; besides fairness and free-riding phenomena among the subscribers, it is important to ensure that non-subscribers are not significantly penalized (or excluded) when attempting to use public resources. The other approach considers resolving the competition at the price setting arena (auctioning), instead of allowing it to occur at the (physical) resource access level inducing congestion penalties. A comparison of this approach with the uncoordinated access shows that it is possible to have win-win situations under which the public resource operator earns more and users pay less.

Speaker Bio:
Prof. Ioannis Stavrakakis (IEEE Fellow, Dept. Head) (http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~istavrak/),  is professor in the Dept. of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He received his diploma in electrical engineering from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki and his Ph.D. in the same field from University of Virginia, USA. He served as assistant professor in CSEE, University of Vermont (USA), 1988-1994; associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, in Northeastern University, Boston (USA), 1994-1999; associate professor of informatics and telecommunications, in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), 1999-2002; and as professor since 2002. Teaching and research interests are focused on resource allocation protocols and stochastic traffic management and congestion control for communication networks (peer-to-peer, mobile, ad hoc, autonomic, delay tolerant, social and future Internet), with recent emphasis on human driven decision-making in distributed competitive environments and information-centric networking. His research has been published in over 220 scientific journals and conference proceedings and was funded by USA-NSF, DARPA, GTE, BBN and Motorola (USA) as well as Greek and European Union (IST, FET, FIRE) funding agencies. He has served repeatedly in NSF and EU-IST research proposal review panels and involved in the TPC and organization of numerous conferences sponsored by IEEE, ACM, ITC and IFIP societies. He has served as chairman of IFIP WG6.3 and elected officer for IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC). He has been in the editorial board of Computer Communications, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, ACM/Springer Wireless Networks and Computer Networks journals. He has served as head of the Communications and Signal Processing Division, director of graduate studies, and department head.