Future high-performance networks will rely on smart devices able to cooperate, take decisions in a distributed fashion according to their own objectives, reconfigure dynamically by reacting to the envi- ronment. Such behavior requires efficient techniques to coordinate the actions of different nodes who are not necessarily obedient but rather strategic. Thus, a key challenge is to understand the interaction between two different types of constraints: the strategic constraints, imposed by the decentralized nature of the decision process, and the information processing contraints, imposed by the environment such as noise effect, network鈥檚 topology or exogenous restrictions on the number of messages.
The PhD candidate will address the problem of 鈥渟trategic communication鈥 by leveraging recent re- sults [1, 2] at the interplay between Information Theory and Game Theory. The key idea is to model the actions performed by the nodes by discrete random variables, and to measure the level of coordina- tion [3, 4, 5] by the distance between their joint distribution and a target distribution. In contrast to the information-theoretic paradigm [7], we assume that the nodes optimally disclose their information according to their own objectives, e.g. as in the 鈥淏ayesian persuasion game鈥 [6].
The highly motivated PhD applicant must have good mathematical skills. The PhD thesis will be supervised by Ma毛l Le Treust, CNRS permanent researcher. Doctoral contract is funded by the Paris Seine Initiative and offers a remuneration of 40k e /year for a duration of three years. Applicant should send a short email together with master鈥檚 degree transcripts, recommandation letters and Curriculum Vit忙 to the address below.
Expected start date: October - December 2018 (flexible).
Location: Laboratory ETIS UMR 8051, Universit茅 Paris Seine, Universit茅 Cergy-Pontoise, ENSEA, CNRS, 6 avenue du Ponceau, 95014 Cergy-Pontoise, France.
References
[1] M. Le Treust and T. Tomala, 鈥淚nformation-theoretic limits of strategic communication,鈥 draft available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.05147, July 2018.
[2] M. Le Treust and T. Tomala, 鈥淧ersuasion with limited communication capacity,鈥 draft available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.04474, Dec. 2017.
[3] O. Gossner, P. Hern脿ndez, and A. Neyman, 鈥淥ptimal use of communication resources,鈥 Econometrica, vol. 74, no. 6, pp. 1603鈥1636, 2006.
[4] P. Cuff, H. Permuter, and T. Cover, 鈥淐oordination capacity,鈥 老澳门开奖直播 Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 56, no. 9, pp. 4181鈥4206, 2010.
[5] M. Le Treust, 鈥淛oint empirical coordination of source and channel,鈥 老澳门开奖直播 Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 63, pp. 5087鈥5114, Aug 2017.
[6] E. Kamenica and M. Gentzkow, 鈥淏ayesian persuasion,鈥 American Economic Review, vol. 101, pp. 2590鈥2615, 2011.
[7] A. E. Gamal and Y.-H. Kim, Network Information Theory. Cambridge University Press, Dec. 2011.
Contact: Ma毛l Le Treust ([email protected])
Phone: +33 (0)1 30 73 62 64
Webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/maelletreust/