ICGT, Tel Aviv

At Tel Aviv, on the 26th floor of Levinstein tower, we gathered to discuss Computational Game Theory during ICGT 3 (there was BAGT 5 sometime ago, and SAGT 1 last week).

• Uri Feige spoke about different axiomatic systems for trust-based recommendations and showed axiom sets that uniquely yielded random-walk or mincut or majority-of-majority voting based solutions. Puts some theory muscle behind these intuitive approaches. Cool stuff!
• Aviv Zohar spoke about game-theory of interdomain routing. This is not my area of research, but it was good to see the abstract ways to reason wrt messy protocols like BGP.
  
• Itai Ashlagi spoke about how to choose between competing auctions (say advertise on site G and Y or only G or only Y). I really liked this work. It takes a lot of formulation to even address this question in principle, and Itai gave a nice, detailed talk.
  
• Moni Naor gave a fantastic talk on rational secret sharing, and in general, game-theory + cryptography (didn't get to the part about using games to extract randomness). Very exciting.
  

This is Israel, so the total intellectual strength in any meeting is high; on top of that, the organizers managed to pull together a terrific audience, and for a day, I was happy to soak in the gestalt.