Mechanism design for Cloud Computing and Crowdsourcing

The Internet gives us access to many agents that can help us complete tasks. These agents can come either in the form of machines (cloud computing) or people (crowdsourcing). However, generally these other agents do not provide their services for free; instead, they have privately known costs for providing their service. I will show how auction theory, and more generally the theory of mechanism design, in some cases allows us to allocate the tasks efficiently in a way that benefits all (even if agents are strategic), whereas in other cases there are fundamental limitations. Specifically, in the context of mechanism design for scheduling unrelated machines (as proposed by Nisan and Ronen), I prove a lower bound of 1+φ on the approximation ratio obtainable by such mechanisms. I also prove several other results for characterizing truthful mechanisms. These involve the geometry of such mechanisms and techniques that allow us to transfer characterization results across domains. I further study the problem where a task (or multiple unrelated tasks) must be executed, and our objective is to minimize the expected sum of the agents’ processing times, However, each agent does not know exactly how long it will take him to finish the task; he only knows the distribution from which this time is drawn. I present the ChPE mechanism, which is uniquely tailored to our problem, and has many desirable properties including: not rewarding agents that fail to finish the task and having non-negative payments.

Speaker Details

Angelina Vidali is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science at Duke University (USA). Her research lies in the intersection of computer science and economics and focuses on understanding strategic behavior in in electronic markets, cloud computing and crowdsourcing, and designing mechanisms that give incentives to selfish agents to report their true types and perform computation tasks exerting full effort. At Duke she organizes an interdisciplinary seminar series (Departments of Economics, Computer Science and Fuqua School of Business) sponsored by Yahoo. She received her PhD from the Department of Informatics of the University of Athens (Greece), advised by Elias Koutsoupias. She also held Postdoctoral Researcher Positions at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Germany) and at the University of Vienna (Austria). Her research and studies have been supported by grants from the Vienna Science and Technology Fund, the Alexander von Humboldt foundation, the Alexandros Onassis foundation, the University of Athens, the Greek State Scholarship Foundation and the Greek Secretariat for Research and Technology.

Date:
Speakers:
Angelina Vidali
Affiliation:
Duke University
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