Security Games: Key Algorithmic Principles, Deployed Applications and Research Challenges

Security is a critical concern around the world, whether it is the challenge of protecting ports, airports and other critical infrastructure, protecting endangered wildlife, forests and fisheries, suppressing urban crime or security in cyberspace. Unfortunately, limited security resources prevent full security coverage at all times; instead, we must optimize the use of limited security resources. To that end, our “security games” framework — based on computational game theory, while also incorporating elements of human behavior modeling, AI planning under uncertainty and machine learning — has led to building and deployment of decision aids for security agencies in the US and around the world. These decision aids are in use by agencies such as the US Coast Guard, the Federal Air Marshals Service and by various police agencies at university campuses, airports and metro trains. Moreover, recent work on “green security games” has led our decision aids to begin assisting NGOs in protection of wildlife; and “opportunistic crime security games” have focused on suppressing urban crime. I will discuss our use-inspired research in security games that is leading to new research challenges, including algorithms for scaling up security games as well as for handling significant adversarial uncertainty and learning models of human adversary behaviors. Joint work with a number of current and former PhD students, postdocs all listed at teamcore.usc.edu/security.

Date:
Speakers:
Milind Tambe
Affiliation:
USC