BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:researchseminars.org CALSCALE:GREGORIAN X-WR-CALNAME:researchseminars.org BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Long Tran-Thanh (University of Warwick) DTSTART:20200728T120000Z DTEND:20200728T130000Z DTSTAMP:20260423T034449Z UID:DSCSS/4 DESCRIPTION:Title: On COPs\, Bandits\, and AI for Good\nby Long Tran-Thanh (University of W arwick) as part of Data Science and Computational Statistics Seminar\n\n\n Abstract\nIf you have a question about this talk\, please contact Hong Duo ng.\n\nIn the recent years there has been an increasing interest in applyi ng techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle societal and env ironmental challenges\, ranging from climate change and natural disasters\ , to food safety and disease spread. These efforts are typically known und er the name AI for Good. While many research work in this area have been f ocusing on designing machine learning algorithms to learn new insights/pre dict future events from previously collected data\, there is another domai n where AI has been found to be useful\, namely: resource allocation and d ecision making. In particular\, a key step in addressing societal/environm ental challenges is to efficiently allocate a set of sparse resources to m itigate the problem(s). For example\, in the case of wildfire\, a decision maker has to adaptively and sequentially allocate a limited number of fir efighting units to stop the spread of the fire as soon as possible. Anothe r example comes from the problem of housing management for people in need\ , where a limited number of housing units have to be allocated to applican ts in an online manner over time.\n\nWhile sequential resource allocation can be often casted as (online) combinatorial optimisation problems (COPs) \, they can differ from the standard COPs when the decision maker has to p erform under uncertainty (e.g.\, the value of the action is not known in a dvance\, or future events are unknown at the decision making stage). In th e presence of such uncertainty\, a popular tool from the decision making l iterature\, called multi-armed bandits\, comes in handy. In this talk\, I will demonstrate how to efficiently combine COPs with bandit models to tac kle some AI for Good problems. In particular\, I first show how to combine knapsack models with combinatorial bandits to efficiently allocate firefi ghting units and drones to mitigate wildfires. In the second part of the t alk\, I will demonstrate how interval scheduling\, paired up with blocking bandits\, can be a useful approach as a housing assignment method for peo ple in need.\n\nShort bio of the speaker:\n\nLong is a Hungarian-Vietnames e computer scientist at the University of Warwick\, UK\, where he is curre ntly an Associate Professor. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Southampton in 2012\, under the supervision of Nick Jennings and Alex Roge rs. Long has been doing active research in a number of key areas of Artifi cial Intelligence and multi-agent systems\, mainly focusing on multi-armed bandits\, game theory\, and incentive engineering\, and their application s to crowdsourcing\, human-agent learning\, and AI for Good. He has publis hed more than 60 papers at top AI conferences (AAAI\, AAMAS \, ECAI\, IJCA I \, NeurIPS\, UAI ) and journals (JAAMAS\, AIJ )\, and have received a nu mber of national/international awards\, such as:\n\n(i) BCS /CPHC Best Com puter Science PhD Dissertation Award (2012/13) – Honourable Mention\; (i i) ECCAI /EurAI Best Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award (2012/13) – Honourable Mention\; (iii) AAAI Outstanding Paper Award (2012) – Hon ourable Mention (out of more than 1000 submissions)\; and (iv) ECAI Best S tudent Paper Award (2012)- Runner-Up (out of more than 600 submissions). ( v) IJCAI 2019 Early Career Spotlight Talk – invited\n\nLong currently se rves as a board member (2018-2024) of the IFAAMAS Directory Board\, the ma in international governing body of the International Federation for Autono mous Agents and Multiagent Systems\, a major sub-field of the AI community . He is also the local chair of the AAMAS 2021 conference\, which will be held in London\, UK.\n LOCATION:https://researchseminars.org/talk/DSCSS/4/ END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR