Onn Shehory ECCAI Sponsored Keynote Speaker

Onn Shehory ECCAI Sponsored Keynote Speaker

Dr. Onn Shehory, IBM Master Inventor, IBM Haifa Research Lab. (ECCAI Sponsored Keynote Speaker)

Title: Excerpts from the study of coalitions: from social behavior to computer science

Abstract.

From the very early days of human society, people have engaged in coalitions. Individuals in the context of others typically have to interact and collaborate to meet their goals. Collaboration can take place in diverse ways, and indeed various collaboration mechanisms have emerged across history. Science has attempted to study the collaborative phenomenon of coalescing. Philosophical and social studies were conducted first, followed by game theoretic and mathematical research. Computer science, and in particular the multi-agent systems discipline attempted to leverage the game theoretic coalitional solutions and relax them.

Multiple coalitional games have been considered to facilitate collaboration, and many mechanisms have been devised. Within such coalitions, software agents may jointly perform tasks that they would otherwise be unable to perform, or will perform poorly. To allow agent collaboration via coalitions, one should devise a coalition formation mechanism that exhibit desirable properties such as stability, fairness, optimality, and computational tractability. Agents that take part in those mechanisms should be provided with algorithms to guide their activity within. Yet, no solution can concurrently address all of these requirements. This problem intensifies when the number of agents increases.

In this talk I will present excerpts from coalitions' research. I will discuss agent attributes and mechanism properties and their effect on interaction. I will present some games that facilitate interaction as well as algorithms that implement feasible solutions to such games. I will finally present challenges in the context of social networks, big data and security risks.

Short bio.

Dr. Onn Shehory received his B.Sc. in physics and computer science in 1989, M.Sc. in physics in 1992, and Ph.D. in computer science in 1996, all from Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. He was a post-doctoral fellow and then a visiting assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA from 1996 to 1999. In 1999 he joined the IBM Haifa Research Lab as a research staff member, a position he holds to date. From 2000 to 2006 he was an adjunct lecturer and senior lecturer at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. From 2002 to date he is an adjunct senior lecturer at Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel.

Dr. Shehory has edited 15 books, authored over 90 articles, and filed more than 25 patents. Among his research activities are large-scale distributed systems, multi-agent systems, coalition formation, electronic commerce, autonomic systems and software engineering. A paper of his [1] won the 2014 IFAAMAS influential paper award. Two other papers of his won best paper awards. He takes active roles in EU research projects and has served as a coordinator and technical leader of an international research project on software autonomy.

Dr. Shehory is an associate editor of the International Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, the International Journal on Agent Oriented Software Engineering, and the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems. He served a six years term as a board member of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS). Dr. Shehory served on numerous program committees and as an organizer of multiple international conferences. In 2013, he served as the general chair of the international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2013).

Selected publications

  1. O. Shehory and S. Kraus Methods for task allocation via agent coalition formation, Artificial Intelligence Journal, Vol. 101 (1-2), May 1998, pages 165-200.

  2. O. Shehory and S. Kraus. Feasible Formation of Coalitions Among Autonomous Agents in Non-Super-Additive Environments, Computational Intelligence, Vol. 15(3), August 1999, pages 218-251.

  3. O. Shehory. Optimal bidding in multiple concurrent auctions. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, Vol. 11(3-4), pages 315-327, 2002.

  4. A. Rosenfeld, G. Kaminka, S. Kraus and O. Shehory. A Study of Mechanisms for Improving Robotic Group Performance. Artificial Intelligence Journal. Vol. 172 (6-7), April 2008, pages 633-655.

  5. M. Goldstein, O. Shehory, R. Tzoref and S. Ur. Improving Throughput via Slowdowns. ICSE 2010, Cape Town, South Africa, May 2010.

  6. D. Breitgand, M. Goldstein, E. Henis, O. Shehory. Efficient Control of False Negative and False Positive Errors with Separate Adaptive Thresholds. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM), Vol. 8, No. 2, pp.128–140, June 2011.

  7. W. Hummer, O. Raz, O. Shehory, P. Leitner, and S. Dustdar. Test Coverage of Data-Centric Dynamic Compositions in Service-Based Systems. ICST 2011, Berlin, March 2011.

  8. Y. Adler, N. Behar, O. Raz, O. Shehory, N. Steindler, S. Ur, A. Zlotnick. Code Coverage Analysis in Practice for Large Systems. ICSE 2011, Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2011.

  9. S. Das, Y. Nahum, D. Sarne, O. Shehory. Two-Sided Search with Experts. Accepted, ACM EC'12, Valencia, June 2012.