CAM Colloquium: Francesca Parise (ECE, Cornell) - Analysis and interventions in large network games: graphon games and graphon contagion

Description

Abstract:
Many of today’s most promising technological systems involve very large numbers of autonomous agents that influence each other and make strategic decisions within a network structure. Examples include opinion dynamics, targeted marketing in social networks, economic exchange and international trade, product adoption and social contagion.

While traditional tools for the analysis of these systems assumed that a social planner has full knowledge of the network of interactions, when we turn to very large networks two issues emerge. First, collecting data about the exact network of interactions becomes very expensive or not at all possible because of privacy concerns. Second, methods for designing optimal interventions that rely on the exact network structure typically do not scale well with the population size.

To obviate these issues, in this talk I will present a framework in which the social planner designs interventions based on probabilistic instead of exact information about agent’s interactions. I will introduce the tool of “graphon games” as a way to formally describe strategic interactions in this setting and I will illustrate how this tool can be exploited to design interventions. I will cover two main applications: targeted budget allocation and optimal seeding in contagion processes. In both cases, I will illustrate how the graphon approach leads to interventions that are asymptotically optimal in terms of the population size and can be computed without requiring exact network data.

Bio:
Francesca Parise is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Previous to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT, she defended her PhD at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2016 and she received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Information and Automation Engineering in 2010 and 2012, respectively, from the University of Padova, Italy, where she simultaneously attended the Galilean School of Excellence.

Francesca’s main research interest is in control, network and game theory. She has worked on a broad set of topics, including distributed multi-agent systems, social and economic network analysis, contagion models, aggregative games and opinion dynamics.

Francesca was recognized as an EECS rising star in 2017 and is the recipient of the Guglielmo Marin Award from the “Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti”, the SNSF Early Postdoc Fellowship, the SNSF Advanced Postdoc Fellowship and the ETH Medal for her doctoral work.

Zoom Link Access:
This talk will be given via Zoom, and the link is emailed to the CAM Seminar listserv the week of the talk. If you are not on the listserv, please contact Erika Fowler-Decatur to request the link.