Assistant Professor Pingzhong Tang from IIIS, Tsinghua University, was invited to deliver an Early-career Spotlight talk at the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2017), held in Melbourne, Australia, from August 19-25, 2017. So far, Prof. Tang is the only invited speaker from China, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan regions China, during the Plenary Talk.
With Large-scale Applied Mechanism Design as his topic, Prof. Tang shared his experience at the computational economics group at IIIS, where they combined AI technology and economic models and applied them into large-scale mechanism design setting. The talk concentrated three settings including water right market, e-commerce sorting algorithm and reserve price of online ad auctions. Prof. Tang introduced the scientific advances in the interdisciplinary field of AI and economics, covering how to adopt economic theory to standardize AI algorithm design, and how to use the practical effects of AI techniques optimizing economic mechanisms to help traditional economic theory applied in large-scale Internet setting.
Prof. Tang’s talk brought on extensive discussion. Prof. Craig Boutilier, Director of CS Department at university of Toronto, Principal Scientist at Google and ACM Fellow, commented “It is very creative to combine mechanism design with reinforcement learning -- that's a correct way of using machine learning”. Prof. Tuomas Sandholm, professor of CS Department at CMU, team leader of computer Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em poker and ACM Fellow, believed “Business impact is one of the largest forms of impact. One of the most important agendas in the economics and computation is to combine AI and economics to create business impact. Congratulations!”, and spoke highly of Prof. Tang’s outstanding achievements. Prof. Tang’s talk also received high evaluation from other domestic and foreign experts.
Meanwhile, Prof. Tang also gave an invited Tutorial introducing the application of auction theory in e-commerce setting and another invited talk on High-frequency mechanism design at E-commerce workshop.
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI, is the most influential international gathering of researchers in AI, held biennially in odd-numbered years since 1969. Over 2000 representatives from academia and industry registered at IJCAI 2017. IJCAI invited 10 to 15 outstanding scholars to give Early-career spotlight talks every session.
(By Shuai Sun)
