Recently, the results of the 19th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-2020) and the 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2020) were announced. Five papers from Professor ZhaoDengji's research group were accepted. It is worth mentioning that the first authors of the papers are not only the master's students but also the undergraduate students. They apply traditional algorithmic game theory on social networks and utilize users’ social interactions to overcome new challenges in the global digital economy.
AAMAS is the most influential conference in the field of multi-agent systems. The conference is sponsored by the non-profit organization, IFAAMAS. This year, AAMAS 2020 received a total of 808 paper submissions, and only 186 papers were accepted. Three papers from Professor ZhaoDengji's group were accepted.
The paper “Coalitional Games with Stochastic Characteristic Functions Defined by Private Types” for the first time studied the problem of cooperative games where the characteristic function is not known in advance. The work proposes a new reward sharing mechanism for the problem. Different from the traditional model, the new mechanism can not only ensure that participants are willing to collaborate together, but also incentivize them to reveal their private information truthfully. The experimental results show that the mechanism is widely applicable. Professor Zhao is the first author and our senior undergraduate student Huang Yiqing is the second author.
The paper “Redistribution Mechanism on Networks” focuses on the resource allocation problem on networks without profits. The work for the first time takes users’ social network into consideration. Compared to the traditional mechanism, this mechanism can significantly improve the efficiency of resource allocation. Our 2nd year master student Zhang Wen is the first author and senior undergraduate student Chen Hanyu is the third author.
Zhang Wen is one of the first undergraduates of ShanghaiTech University. After graduation, she continues to pursue her master's degree at ShanghaiTech. Although she is just a second-year master student, this time she has three papers accepted by the two conferences as first author. In AAMAS, her second accepted paper is titled “Collaborative Data Acquisition”. The paper studied the big data collection crowdsourcing problem via social networks in order to gain more participants and more data. In this paper, a new method is designed to incentivize users not only to provide their data but also to invite more participants. Our 1st year master student Zhang Yao has co-authored the paper.
ECAI is one of the three premier conferences in AI, which has strong international influence and is held every two years worldwide. This year, ECAI has received a total of 1443 paper submissions, and only 365 papers were accepted. Two papers from Professor Zhao's group were accepted.
The paper titled “Incentivize Diffusion with Fair Rewards” studied how to incentivize information diffusion on social networks in a fairer way. The information diffusion mechanism based on social networks was first studied by Professor Zhao's team and has widely drawn close attention from international peers. Zhang Wen is the first author and Zhang Yao co-authored.
Furthermore, inspired by Introduction to Algorithmic Game Theory, a course taught by Professor Zhao, three senior undergraduate students studied how to use limited budget to maximize information diffusion via social networks. The results are presented at the paper “Maximal Information Propagation with Budgets” which was also accepted at ECAI. Different from the traditional methods, this paper utilizes the competition between users to incentivize information diffusion, which has very promising applications on social media. Our senior undergraduates Shi Haomin, Si Zilin and Wang Letong and first year master Zhang Yao co-authored the paper.
The achievements of our students not only owe to the excellent guidance of the professor, but also benefit from the very international and research oriented teaching standards of ShanghaiTech. All our students get chances to do scientific research during their undergraduate study and build a solid foundation for their further study and research.
Fig. 1：Experimental results for reward sharing mechanisms; Fig. 2: Overview of Network-based Redistribution Mechanism; Fig. 3：Overview of Crowdsourcing Diffusion Mechanism
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