I am currently doing Ph.D. studies in computer science under the supervision of Dr. Brahim Chaib-draa in the DAMAS laboratory of the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department at Laval University. I am focusing my research on the application of game theory to computer science in general and on mechanism design in particular.
Game theory studies the behavior of rational agents (an agent is rational if it maximizes its personal profit or utility) when the rules of the game are known. Mechanism design studies the inverse problem. When we want a particular behavior from the rational agents, what are the rules that must be set for the game? Informally, this set of rules is called a mechanism. There exist a long tradition of research on mechanism design in economics but recently, computer scientists began studying it also because distributed systems, like the Internet, can be considered also as an economy. Users of such systems often try to maximize their own utility while the designer of the systems believed that the users would obey the pattern of use the designer had in mind when he or she designed the system. For more information on my current research, please visit the Web page on the Mechanism Design and Computer Science project.
Previously, I obtained a Master's degree in computer science (the Group Buy project) under the supervision of Dr. Brahim Chaib-draa at the same institution. I used cooperative game theory (coalition formation) for a multiagent problem; namely, group buying.
Game theory is useful in computer science because more and more self-interested software agents are used. These agents, which represent another agent or a human, are driven only by their own profit that they want to maximize. We can find this type of agents in e-commerce, in supply chain management, in grid computing and in many more domains.
