Ian Kash

Contact Information Email:  kash --at--seas.harvard.edu Office Address:            110 Maxwell Dworkin                                     Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138

About Me

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University. My research uses game theory to study how to design systems for self-interested users.  Much of my work has been on the design of scrip systems, which are systems where an artificial currency (scrip) is used to prevent free riding or solve resource allocation problems.  Practical systems need to be robust to unexpected behavior, so my work has included issues such as altruism, hoarding, sybils, collusion, and the interaction of byzantine and rational agents.  Agents need to be able to efficiently learn how to behave in large systems, so some of my recent work has been on multiagent learning. I did my Ph.D. at Cornell University advised by Eric Friedman and Joe Halpern. In the past I have worked with Wilfried Sieg on automated theorem proving, Guy Blelloch on graph compression, and Yiming Yang on extracting parallel corpora from the web for crosslingual information retrieval.

CV

My CV

Publications

Ian A. Kash and Yee Jiun Song.  One-step k-set Agreement. Under Submission.

Ian A. Kash, Eric J. Friedman, and Joseph Y. Halpern.  Manipulating Scrip Systems: Sybils and Collusion. Proceedings of the First Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications (AMMA'09), 2009. PS Extended Version PPT

Ian A. Kash, Eric J. Friedman, and Joseph Y. Halpern.  Multiagent Learning in Large Anonymous Games.  Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'09), pages 765-772, 2009. PDF PPT

Ian A. Kash, Eric J. Friedman, and Joseph Y. Halpern.  Brief Announcement: The Lotus-Eater Attack.  Proceedings of the Twenty Seventh Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'08), page 455, 2008. PDF Extended Version (PS) PPT

Ian A. Kash, Eric J. Friedman, and Joseph Y. Halpern.  Optimizing Scrip Systems: Efficiency, Crashes, Hoarders, and Altruists.  Proceedings of Eighth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'07), pages 305-315, 2007. PDF PPT

Eric J. Friedman, Joseph Y. Halpern, and Ian A. Kash.  Efficiency and Nash Equilibria in a Scrip System for P2P Networks.  Proceedings of Seventh ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'06), pages 140-149, 2006. PS PPT

Daniel K. Blandford, Guy E. Blelloch, and Ian A. Kash. An Experimental Analysis of a Compact Graph Representation. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX'04), pages 49-61, 2004. PDF

Daniel K. Blandford, Guy E. Blelloch, and Ian A. Kash.  Compact Representations of Separable Graphs.  In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA'03), pages 679-688, 2003. PDF