MSR NYC Data Science Seminar Series: From “In” to “Over”: Behavioral Experiments on Whole-Network Computation

We report on a series of behavioral experiments in human computation on three different tasks over networks: graph coloring, community detection (or graph clustering), and competitive contagion. While these tasks share similar action spaces and interfaces, they capture a diversity of computational challenges: graph coloring is a search problem, clustering is an optimization problem, and competitive contagion is a game-theoretic problem. In contrast with much of the recent literature on human-subject experiments in networks, in which collectives of subjects are embedded “in” the network, and have only local information and interactions, here individual subjects have a global (or “over”) view and must solve “whole network” problems alone. Our primary findings are that subject performance is impressive across all three problem types; that subjects find diverse and novel strategies for solving each task; and that collective performance can often be strongly correlated with known algorithms.

Joint work with Lili Dworkin.

Speaker Details

Michael Kearns is a professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the National Center Chair and has joint appointments in the Wharton School. He is founding director of Penn’s Networked and Social Systems Engineering (NETS) program (www.nets.upenn.edu), and founding director of Penn’s Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences (www.warrencenter.upenn.edu). His research interests include topics in machine learning, algorithmic game theory, social networks, and computational finance. He has worked and consulted extensively in the technology and finance industries. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Date:
Speakers:
Michael Kearns
Affiliation:
Wharton School - University of Pennsylvania
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