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Courtesy of Gabriele Farina.Article Author
May 31, 2024
The award is given annually for an outstanding dissertation in the field of economics and computation
Gabriele Farina has received the 2023 SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “Game-Theoretic Decision Making in Imperfect-Information Games Learning Dynamics, Equilibrium Computation, and Complexity.” The award is given for an outstanding dissertation in the field of economics and computation, and is conferred annually at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Economics and Computation.
Farina’s thesis extensively contributes to our fundamental understanding of equilibrium computation and learning in imperfect-information games, resolving recognized open problems, establishing new positive complexity results, and leading in several cases to state-of-the-art performance in theory and/or practice. Among other breakthroughs, it resolves the existence of efficient learning dynamics leading to extensive-form correlated equilibria, provides state-of-the-art regret rates for learning in multiplayer imperfect-information settings, and yields positive complexity results together with the first polynomial-time algorithm for exact sequentially-rational equilibria in large-scale games.
Farina is the X-Window Consortium Professor and Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). He works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer science, operations research, and economics, with a focus on learning and optimization methods for sequential decision-making under imperfect information, and computational game theory. Before joining LIDS, he spent a year as a Research Scientist at Meta, where he helped design the learning dynamics behind Cicero, a human-level AI agent combining strategic reasoning and natural language. He is a recipient of the ACM SIGEcom dissertation award, the Runners Up Victor Lesser dissertation award, Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science’s dissertation award, a NeurIPS Best Paper Award, an ICLR Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention, and a Facebook Fellowship in the area of economics and computer science. He earned a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, and a BS in control theory from Politecnico di Milano.
ACM Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation (SIGecom) encourages research and applications at the interface between computer science and economics, using economic ideas and computational reasoning to understand and improve social and economic interactions.