Optimal Cooperation, Communication, and Learning in Decentralized Systems

The Banff International Research Station will host the "Optimal Cooperation, Communication, and Learning in Decentralized Systems " workshop from October 12th to October 17th, 2014.

Decentralized decision-making is a unifying theme of a very diverse set of problems and applications of current interest both to researchers and to practitioners. These include: collective decision-making and problem-solving via crowdsourcing and social networks; design and implementation of economic mechanisms and control policies for smart grids, health care, and other large-scale socioeconomic infrastructures; parallel and distributed computing for large-scale machine learning problems; cybersecurity; etc. It is becoming increasingly apparent that one can distill a common set of core features shared by these heterogeneous problem domains, and to identify a common list of core questions that need urgent attention. By bringing together researchers from separate communities (including stochastic control, economics, machine learning, and information theory) that do not normally interact, and by highlighting the common threads and methodological approaches underlying much of the research into large-scale decentralized systems, the proposed workshop will lead to cross-fertilization of ideas and to mutually beneficial exchange of perspectives.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).

BIRS Scientific Director, Nassif Ghoussoub
E-mail: birs-director[@]birs.ca
http://www.birs.ca/~nassif