CSSE Seminar Series (CSSESS)
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Seminar
Many Heads Are Better Than One: Benefits of Group Decision Making under Conditions of Uncertainty and Incompleteness.
Speaker: Christian Guttmann.
Institute: Monash University.
Time/Place: 3:10 pm, Friday, 17 Apr, in Room 031, Erskine Building.
All are welcome.
Abstract
Group decision making enables agents to reach an agreement on how to coordinate their actions. Research in distributed computing and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has focused on achieving fair and logical group decision outcomes (eg social choice and voting) and reaching joint agreements when agents follow strategies (eg auctioning and negotiation). Many of these studies make a simplistic assumption: the input of individual agents is based on complete information of the domain in question. Our approach relaxes this assumption and studies group decisions where individual group members do not have accurate and complete knowledge of their own behaviour and that of collaborators for the allocation of tasks. Our research interest is in making group decisions more informed by using input offered by several group members. As group members learn over time, decisions are refined and can lead to optimal solutions quicker than using each agent's knowledge in isolation. This talk reports on theoretical and empirical insights on conditions that reach (near-) optimal solutions after only few iterations of group decisions. One key insight is that optimistic and rational agents are guaranteed to find optimal solutions fast.
Biography
Christian holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from Monash University, Australia and two Master degrees (equiv.) from the University Paderborn, Germany, and from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden (and received an annual award for the best Master Thesis on artificial intelligence). Christian has many years of scientific and commercial IT experience working for Hewlett Packard and Ericsson and visiting the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Harvard University, and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS). Christian currently works as a research fellow in the Intelligent Collaborative Care Management (ICCM) project -- a joint project between the British Telecom, England and Monash University. This project develops collaborative models for adherence support and failure prevention in the context of managing patients with chronic disease in the health care domain (our computational models apply to many service oriented domains). We design a network of intelligent agents that assist health care professionals and patients to adhere to plans -- this adherence prevents failures of care plans.
View past or future seminars; or view the CSSESS Home Page.