CSCI 6963/4963 Spring 2010

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Department of Computer Science

CSCI 6963/4963: E-Commerce, Social Networks, and Collective Intelligence

Spring 2010

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Homeworks 2 and 3 are now posted.

There is a homework (due March 1) now up here (no longer RPI access only)

Bibliography with suggested readings (a work in progress) is here!

Some rudimentary project ideas are here (RPI access only).

Welcome to ECSNCI (is that a good acronym?)! We will meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 10 AM in Sage 4112. The first meeting will be on the 25th of January.

OVERVIEW

The Internet has transformed how people interact with each other, lowering the cost of communication, and enabling us to rapidly both discover and pass on new information. This transformation has had major impacts in how we conduct market transactions (think of eBay, Orbitz, or Amazon), how we maintain our social personae (Facebook, Twitter), and how we accumulate and produce knowledge for consumption (Wikipedia, Yelp). This course will cover theoretical foundations of e-commerce and social networks, as well as focusing on practical aspects of understanding how the design of online venues affects the interacions of participants and the success of the venue.

STAFF

Instructor: Sanmay Das
Office: Lally 302
Phone: x2782
Office hours: Mondays from 1:30-3:00 PM, and by appointment.

POLICIES

Detailed policies are in the official syllabus. However, a couple of things are worth stressing. This will be taught as a graduate / upper level undergraduate class. That means I will often expect you to have done the reading in advance, and you should come to class prepared to participate. That means you need to both attend class regularly, and participate in class discussions. I consider these essential parts of this class, and will grade accordingly. Also, I will be relatively flexible about the particular topics we cover, so there is definitely room to adapt our schedule according to the interests of students in the class!

Course Syllabus

TEXTBOOKS

There is one textbook for this class. We will use this textbook for some of the material, but it will be heavily supplemented with readings from the academic literature.

NRTV: Algorithmic Game Theory , N. Nisan, T. Roughgarden, E. Tardos and V.V. Vazirani, eds. Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521872829. The link is to a non-printable PDF version of the book, so you don't have to purchase it.

PREREQUISITES

I expect some mathematical maturity. Officially, you should previously have taken at least one 4000-level or higher class in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or Economics. If you have done so, you will probably be fine in this class.

LECTURES

Lectures will be on Mondays and Thursdays from 10AM to approximately 11:30AM in Sage 4112. the whole class.

Date	Topics	Readings
Jan 25	Introduction. Course policies. Course overview.	Foreword to NRTV.
Jan 28	Introduction to prediction markets.	NRTV Chapter 26.
Feb 1	Market making + a trading experiment.	Sections 1 and 2 of [Das 08]
Feb 4	Another trading experiment. More on market-making	This blog post Sections 1, 2.1, 2.2 of [DM 08]
Feb 8	More on market-making.	[Han 03] [DM 08]
Feb 11	Market-making wrap-up. Intro to game theory.	[BDM 10]
Feb 15	No class (President's Day)
Feb 18	Intro to game theory, contd. Examples of games. Dominant strategies.	Chapter 1 of NRTV
Feb 22	Solution concepts: Nash equilibria, mixed strategies, correlated equilibria.	Chapter 1 of NRTV
Feb 25	Subgame-perfect equilibria. Intro to social choice.	Sections 1.5, 9.1 of NRTV
Mar 1	Social choice, contd., and Arrow's Theorem.	Section 9.2 of NRTV
Mar 4	Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem. VCG auctions.	Sections 9.2, 9.3 of NRTV
Mar 15	Examples of VCG auctions + in-spirit VCG auctions. Sponsored search and GSP auctions. Comparison.	Section 9.3 of NRTV. Intro and Sections 1 and 2 of [EOS 07]
Mar 18	Novelty and popularity	[WH 07], [WH 08], [LBK 09]
Mar 22	Wikipedia: Elite and common users	[KCPSM 07]
Mar 25	A model of information growth in Wikipedia. PageRank.	[DM 10], [PBMW 99]
Mar 29	Trading games!
Apr 1
Apr 5	Presenters: Craig MacHaffie, Byron Hulcher, Brian Chitester
Apr 8	Presenters: Aseem Brahma, Ram Chava, Meenal Chhabra
Apr 12	Presenters: Sam Colton, Ameya Hate, Matthew Strosnick
Apr 15	Presenters: Nicolas Sayavedra, Calvin Chow, Daniel Patrick
Apr 19	No class.
Apr 22	Presenters: Mithun Chakraborty, Yonatan Naamad, Sean Barnett
Apr 26	Presenters: Buster Holzbauer, Devin Ross, Reilly Hamilton
Apr 29
May 3
May 6	Project presentations: Aseem, Mithun, Meenal, Matt, Buster and Nico, Yonatan, Ram, Ameya
May 10	Project presentations: Devin, Dan, Byron and Brian, Sam, Reilly, Sean, Craig, Calvin, Maurice