Game Theory and Distributed Computing: Their Mutual Relationships
In recent decades, it has been shown that several tasks in computer science, such as modeling, analysis, design and synthesis, testing, validation, and verification of distributed and multi-agent systems can be addressed and formulated by using game theoretic terms and theorems. In fact, the interactions between autonomous agents in a multi-agent system, also the relations between components of a reactive and component based system and their coordination, all can be dealt with as game-playing situations. In more fundamental words, game theoretic models can play the role of the semantic domains for any kind of formal logic that is used to specify the behaviors and interactions in a concurrent system. The exists interactions can be modeled and analyzed using various forms of games and the design and synthesis of their coordination and control can be considered as some kinds of mechanism design. On the other hand, there are several computational problems in the field of game theory that should be addressed by computer scientists using distributed algorithms and artificial intelligence techniques. In this talk, the main mutual relationships of game theory and the theory of distributed computing are reviewed and some concrete examples are discussed. Some of these examples are as follow: using game theoretical and machine learning techniques in resource management and scheduling of workflows in fog and edge computing environments, modeling and analysis of distributed consensus problems such as Byzantine agreement, controller synthesis for components connectors through bounded rational verification (using concurrent and suspect games), strategy learning for predicting human behavior in repeated games.
A short bio
At present, Mohammad Izadi is an associate professor of computer engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. In recent two decades, he also has worked as assistant professor of computer engineering in Sharif University of Technology and assistant professor of philosophy of science in Research Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies and Iranian Academy of Philosophy. He has a PhD degree from Leiden University, the Netherlands, also a PhD Degree in Computer Software Engineering and two master degrees, in computer engineering and philosophy of science, all from Sharif University of Technology. For five years, he was the dean of education at Sharif University of Technology and for two years the dean of research affairs at the Research Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran. His main fields of research and teaching include distributed and multi-agent systems, game theory for computer science, logic and semantics, artificial intelligence and philosophy of computing.