SPEAKERS

Professor Joel Brown is an evolutionary ecologist. He asks the question: How does natural selection acting as an optimization process determine feeding behaviors, population characteristics, and the properties of communities? His research includes the mathematical formulation and field tests of models and hypotheses based on foraging theory, consumer-resource models of species coexistence, and evolutionary game theory using the concept of evolutionary stable strategies (ESS). He uses the giving-up density approach to examine the ecology of fear in fox squirrels, the community organization of desert granivores in the Negev Desert, in Israel, the effects of granivory, herbivory, and fire on prairie and applications to the ecology of black rhinoceros, leopards preying upon blues and mountain lions preying upon mule deer.

Professor Ravindra B. Bapat, current head of the Delhi branch of the Indian Statistical Institute, is one of the world's leading experts in combinatorial linear algebra with outstanding contributions in several areas pertaining to linear algebra, matrix theory and group theory. He got his PhD from UIC in 1980-81 under the guidance of Professor Raghavan. In his thesis On Permanents and Diagonal Products of Doubly Stochastic Matrices he contributed significantly to solve the famous van der Waerden conjecture for the permanents of doubly stochastic matrices. His monograph on Nonnegative Matrices and Applications with Professor Raghavan published in 1996 contains substantial parts of his original contributions to matrix theory including his elegant proof of the so called Alexandroff inequality for mixed discriminants. Cambridge University Press has just recently brought in the same book in paperback edition. He also serves as an Advisory Editor for the European Mathematical Society.

Professor Tamas Solymosi, from the Corvinus University of Budapest, completed his thesis titled On Computing the Nucleoulus for Cooperative Games in 1993 at UIC under the supervision of Professor Raghavan. His algorithmic joint work with Professor Raghavan to locate the nucleolus for assignment games caught the attention of several game theorists and computer scientists and lead to several PhD theses. He has continued his researches for wider classes of cooperative games. He was chosen to become one of the associate editors of the International Journal of Game Theory, the coveted journal exclusively for game theoretic research.. His researches in core stability and assignment games have been extensively cited in game theory literature.

Professor Jerzy Filar is the Foundation Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of South Australia . He did his PhD thesis (UIC 1980) under Professor Raghavan on Algorithms for solving Undiscounted stochastic games, contributing greatly to his first tenure track job at the Johns Hopkins University. He chose to satisfy his mothers wish to go back to Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society and also serves as Editor-in-chief of Environmental Modeling & Assessment. In 1987, Prof. Raghavan organized an international workshop on stochastic games, here at UIC in honor of Professor L. S. Shapley. Conversations at this workshop with O J Vrieze from the University of Maastricht triggered a fruitful collaboration that lead to their decisive book: Filar, J.A. and Vrieze, O.J. "Competitive Markov Decision Processes - Theory, Algorithms, and Applications" Springer-Verlag, New York, 1996. It is used as the prescribed text book in almost all leading Universities of Europe, US and Asia. It is increasingly being used and referred to by researchers in CS. He has supervised 15 PhDs including his most recent - 22 year old Vietnamese student Giang T. Nguyen - who in 2009 was the University of South Australia's youngest ever PhD graduate.

Professor Sergiu Hart is the current President of the Game Theory Society (2008 - 2010). He is the Kusiel-Vorreuter University Professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He was a visiting Professor at the Department of Economics of Stanford, and Harvard University . His researches with Mas-Colell, the well known Economist of Harvard are known to all researchers in Game theory and Economics. Since 1991 he is a member of the Departments of Economics and Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Rationality (1991 - 1999) there. Hart was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society (1985), was a member of the First Council of the Game Theory Society (2000 - 2005), President of the Israel Mathematical Union (2005 - 2006). He gave the Cowles Lecture at Yale University (2000) and the Walras-Bowley Lecture of the Econometric Society (2003). In 2006 he was elected Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. More than all these, Prof. Raghavan admires his notion of potential for cooperative games and its connections to Shapley value and his deep insights into correlated equilibria, evolutionary equilibria and non-cooperative approaches to arriving at the Shapley value , all of which are cherished by the entire game theoretic community.

Professor Hubert Chin was Prof. Raghavan`s very first Ph.D advisee from, UIC. His 1973 thesis was titled Some Contributions to the Structure of Equilibrium Points in N Person Non-cooperative Games. The thesis essentailly appeared as joint work with Parthasarathy and Raghavan in International J Game theory (1974). While it was a cooperative effort, Prof. Raghavan happily says that the basic ideas of the proof the main theorem (Every completely mixed 3 person game with 2 pure strategies for each player has exactly one Nash equilibrium point) is essentially the work of Chin. This is one of the first theorem of its kind in game theory that used combinatorial reductions to settle the theorem for 793 cases individually. His interests were always on applications of game theory to industry and thus for many years he was game theory researcher at Grumman`s Corporation.

Dr. Zamir Syed. After Filar`s algorithmic work in stochastic games the major algorithmic contribution to Stochastic games is by Zamir Syed. He did his Ph.D here at UIC under the supervision of Prof. Raghavan, and has also collaborated with Prof. Filar. His joint work with Prof. Raghavan on algorithms for discounted stochastic games of perfect information, solved the 50 year old problem in Game theory and algorithmic research. He chose to join industry and his first job was at the think tank of Goldman Sachs, the reputed investment firm where, currently, he is the Portfolio manager of Trans Market group, obviously dealing with millions of dollars!

Professor Piotr Gmitrasiewicz is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, here at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research centers around the notion of rationality in artificial intelligent agents. In his work, the main issues are how agents should decide what actions to execute to coordinate with anticipated actions of the other agents, and how they should decide what communicative actions to engage in. A related problem is that of a theoretical framework for representing knowledge and belief of agents interacting with other agents. His other work includes evolution of agent communication languages, frameworks for representing uncertain knowledge about the environment evolving in time, the notions of time pressure and the value of time, and rational behavior and trade-offs under time pressure. He is also interested in decision-theoretic approaches to game theory, operations research, philosophies of agenthood, and in applications of rational autonomous agents in realistic distributed domains.

Professor Evangelista Fe. As a strong analyst, she chose to work on existence theorems for stochastic games, here at UIC. In 1994, she submitted her thesis on Equilibrium in Bimatrix Games and in Repeated Games with Additive Reward and Transition under the guidance of Professor Raghavan. The main theorem of her thesis appeared in a special volume honoring Professor David Blackwell, the renowned statistician, set theorist and game theorist, edited by Shapley and Ferguson. Her theorem with Raghavan on the extreme points of Correlated equilibria in bimatrix games was greatly appreciated by Nobel Laureate Professor Aumann in his plenary address at the UIC Workshop on Game Theory in 1994. With her commitment to Philippino values and traditions, she chose to take up a simpler teaching position at the University of Wisconsin at White water where she is an associate professor.