Artificial Intelligence Events
CS Seminar on Game Theory by Prof. D. Manjunath
Location: CS1.04
Title: Blotto on the Ballot: A Ballot Stuffing Blotto Game
Abstract:
We consider the following Colonel Blotto game between parties P1 and PA. P1 deploys a non negative number of troops across J battlefields, while PA chooses K, K < J, battlefields to remove all of P1's troops from the chosen battlefields. P1 has the objective of maximizing the number of surviving troops while PA wants to minimize it. Drawing an analogy with ballot stuffing by a party contesting an election and the countermeasures by the Election Commission to negate that, we call this the Ballot Stuffing Game. For this zero-sum resource allocation game, we obtain the set of Nash equilibria as a solution to a convex combinatorial optimization problem. We analyze this optimization problem and obtain insights into the several non trivial features of the equilibrium behavior. These features in turn allow to describe the structure of the solutions and efficient algorithms to obtain then. The model is described as ballot stuffing game in a plebiscite but has applications in security and auditing games. The results are extended to a parliamentary election model. Numerical examples illustrate applications of the game.
Bio:
D. Manjunath received his BE from Mysore University, MS from IIT Madras and PhD from Rensselaer in 1986, 1989, and 1993 respectively. He has been with the Electrical Engineering Dept. of IIT Bombay since July 1998. He has previously worked in CR&D of GE in Schenectady NY (1990), CIS Dept. of Univ. of Delaware (1992--93), CS Dept. Univ. of Toronto (1993--94) and EE Dept. of IIT Kanpur (1994--98). At IIT Bombay, he was head of Computer Centre during 2011-15 and Head, Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data Science (CMInDS) during 2023-3026.
His research interests are in the general areas of computer & communication networks and performance analysis. Some of his recent research has concentrated on economics of the Internet and AI, multi-armed bandit problems, pricing and queue control.