EE SEMINAR: Information Design and Timeliness in Future Communication..

Guest: Melih Baştopçu

Title: Information Design and Timeliness in Future Communication Systems.

Time: March 5, 2024, 16:45 - 17:45

Zoom Link: https://sabanciuniv.zoom.us/j/9113486000

Abstract:Information plays a pivotal role in most modern learning, control, and communication systems. The rise of modern IoT technologies like self-driving cars, augmented reality, and real-time surveillance systems has highlighted the crucial need for time-sensitive information. Beyond timeliness, in domains like online advertising and learning, where information receivers actively make decisions, the actions of the information receivers can impact both the utility of information providers and receivers. Consequently, information providers must strategically craft information to maximize their own utility. In this seminar, I will talk about how problems related to timeliness and information design arise in communication networks in various system settings. Specifically, I will talk about time-varying binary information dissemination over a network of gossiping agents. Here, I will discuss when gossiping can be helpful (or harmful) as it may cause accurate (or incorrect) information to disseminate further in the network. Next, different from the classical communication settings where the objectives of the information provider(s) and the receivers are aligned, I will discuss more general scenarios where the information providers and receiver have misaligned objectives. Modeling this interaction as a hierarchical strategic communication game between multiple senders and the receiver, I will discuss how the competition among multiple senders (due to their misaligned objectives) is beneficial for the receiver. Lastly, I will briefly talk about the extension of our work to an online setting where the sender does not know the receiver's interest and mention our experimental design framework to test spite and probability bias in Bayesian Persuasion.

Bio: Melih Bastopcu received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey in June 2016. He completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, MD, USA, in 2020 and 2021, respectively. At present, he is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focus is on age of information, resource allocation, low latency systems, communication network design, dissemination of misinformation in social networks, and strategic information transmission.