Distinguished CS Colloquium Talk by Prof. Costis Daskalakis on Sep 27th
Title: How to train AI Agents to be Strategic
Speaker: Prof. Costis Daskalakis, MIT
When: Friday, September 27, 2024 @ 10am
Where: HIL 426
Abstract
From playing complex games like Go at super-human level to training AI agents that interact with each other and with humans, many outstanding challenges in AI lie at its interface with Game Theory. Despite some impressive recent hits in this space, developing a general framework for training strategic AI agents has remained elusive. I will discuss this challenge and how to overcome it from a combined game-theoretic and learning-theoretic perspective.
Bio
Costis Daskalakis is the Avanessians Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He holds a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He works on Computation Theory and its interface with Game Theory, Economics, Probability Theory, Machine Learning and Statistics. He has resolved long-standing open problems about the computational complexity of Nash equilibrium, and the mathematical structure and computational complexity of multi-item auctions. His current work focuses on multi-agent learning, high-dimensional statistics, learning from biased and dependent data, causal inference and econometrics. He has been honored with the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Kalai Prize from the Game Theory Society, the Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize, the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the Simons Investigator Award, the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award, the ACM SIGECOM Test of Time Award, and the FOCS 2022 Test of Time Award. He is an ACM fellow, holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Patras, and was awarded the Golden Cross of the Order of the Redeemer by the Greek Presidency. He has served in the scientific and advisory board of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (2018-2020), and as the head of the theory of computation group at MIT (2018-2022). He is a co-founder of Archimedes AI research center where he maintains the role of chief scientist.