James R. Wright

Microsoft Research
7th Floor
641 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10011
jrwright@microsoft.com

Research Interests

My primary research interest is in using data-driven machine learning models to predict human strategic behaviour; that is, behaviour in interactions where each participant's rewards depend partially on the actions of other participants. My long-term research agenda is to build a general theory for optimally designing algorithms for mediating interactions involving humans or other realistically bounded agents rather than idealized, perfectly rational game theoretic agents.

Education

2010–2016: Doctor of Philosophy
Dissertation: Modeling Human Behavior in Strategic Settings
ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention)
University of British Columbia, Canada
2007–2010: Master of Science in Computer Science
Thesis: Beyond Equilibrium: Predicting Human Behaviour in Normal Form Games
University of British Columbia, Canada
1995–2000: Bachelor of Science in Computing Science
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Publications

Competitive peer-reviewed conferences

Learning in the Repeated Secretary Problem.
Daniel G. Goldstein, R. Preston McAfee, Siddarth Suri, and James R. Wright.
ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM-EC), 2017.
Deep Learning for Predicting Human Strategic Behavior.
Jason Hartford, James R. Wright, and Kevin Leyton-Brown.
NIPS 2016: Thirtieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2016.
Oral presentation.
Level-0 Meta-Models for Predicting Human Behavior in Games.
James R. Wright and Kevin Leyton-Brown.
ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM-EC), 2014.
Behavioral Game-Theoretic Models: A Bayesian Framework For Parameter Analysis.
James R. Wright and Kevin Leyton-Brown.
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012), pages 921–928, 2012.
Best student paper (runner up).
Beyond Equilibrium: Predicting Human Behavior in Normal Form Games.
James R. Wright and Kevin Leyton-Brown.
Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-10), pages 901–907, 2010.

Journals

Predicting Human Behavior in Unrepeated, Simultaneous-Move Games.
James R. Wright and Kevin Leyton-Brown.
Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 106, pages 16–37, November 2017.
(supersedes Wright & Leyton-Brown [2010, 2012])

Under review

Models of Level-0 Behavior for Predicting Human Behavior in Games.
James R. Wright and Kevin Leyton-Brown.
Under review at Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
(supersedes Wright & Leyton-Brown [2014])
Incentivizing Evaluation via Limited Access to Ground Truth:
Peer-Prediction Makes Things Worse.
Xi Alice Gao, James R. Wright, and Kevin Leyton-Brown.
Under review by Artificial Intelligence Journal.
(supersedes Gao, Wright, and Leyton-Brown [2016])
Learning in the Repeated Secretary Problem.
Daniel G. Goldstein, R. Preston McAfee, Siddarth Suri, and James R. Wright.
Under review by Management Science.
(Full version of Goldstein et al. [2017])

Other venues

Incentivizing Evaluation via Limited Access to Ground Truth:
Peer-Prediction Makes Things Worse.
Xi Alice Gao, James R. Wright, and Kevin Leyton-Brown.
Workshop on Algorithmic Game Theory and Data Science at ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, 2016.
Mechanical TA: Partially Automated High-Stakes Peer Grading.
James R. Wright, Chris Thornton, Kevin Leyton-Brown.
ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (ACM-SIGCSE), 2015.
Linear Solvers for Nonlinear Games: Using Pivoting Algorithms to Find Nash Equilibria in n-Player Games.
James R. Wright, Albert Xin Jiang, and Kevin Leyton-Brown.
SIGecom Exchanges, volume 10, number 1, pages 9–12, 2011.

Invited Talks

INFORMS-2017: Deep Learning for Human Strategic Modeling.
At INFORMS Annual Meeting,
Houston, Texas. 2017.
CODE-2017: Bayesian Models of Learning in the Repeated Secretary Problem.
At 2017 Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE@MIT),
Boston, Massachusetts. 2017.
EC-17: Learning in the Repeated Secretary Problem.
At ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM-EC),
Boston, Massachusetts. 2017.
IFORS-2017: Deep Learning for Human Strategic Modeling.
At 21st Conference of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies,
Québec City, Québec. 2017.
Simons: Endogenous Cognitive Hierarchy.
At Simons Institute Survey Seminar,
Berkeley, California. 2015.
UBC: Guest lecture for CPSC 430.
University of British Columbia. January, 2015.
ISMP-2015: Level-0 Meta-Models for Predicting Human Behavior in Games.
At 22nd International Symposium on Mathematical Programming
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 2015.
SIGCSE-15: Mechanical TA: Partially Automated High-Stakes Peer Grading.
At ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education,
Kansas City, Missouri. 2015.
UBC: Guest lecture for CPSC 532L.
University of British Columbia. January, 2014.
SFI: Evaluating Set-Valued Predictions.
At Combining Information Theory and Game Theory,
Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico. 2012.
AAMAS-2012: Behavioral Game-Theoretic Models: A Bayesian Framework For Parameter Analysis.
At 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012), Valencia, Spain. 2012.
GAMES-2012: Beyond Equilibrium: Predicting Human Behavior in Normal Form Games.
At 4th World Congress of the Game Theory Society (GAMES-2012), Istanbul, Turkey. 2012.
UBC: Guest lecture for PSYC 417A.
University of British Columbia. February 2012.
LANL: Beyond Equilibrium: Predicting Human Behavior in Normal Form Games.
At Design and Control of Systems of Goal-Directed Agents; From Game Theory to Game Engineering,
Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico. 2010.
AAAI-10: Beyond Equilibrium: Predicting Human Behavior in Normal Form Games.
At Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
Atlanta, Georgia. 2010.
Google: Beyond Equilibrium: Predicting Human Behavior in Normal Form Games.
At Google,
Mountain View, California. 2010.
BQGT: Beyond Equilibrium: Predicting Human Behavior in Normal Form Games.
At Behavioral and Quantitative Game Theory Conference on Future Directions,
Newport Beach, California. 2010.

Awards

2017: ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention)
ACM Special Interest Group on E-commerce
2010–2013: University Graduate Fellowship
University of British Columbia, Canada
Declined in 2010–2012 to hold NSERC
Total value: $80,000
2010–2012: Canada Graduate Scholarship (Ph.D.)
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Total value: $105,000
2008–2009: Canada Graduate Scholarship (M.Sc.)
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Total value: $17,500
2000: Computing Science Graduation Award (for top graduating student in department)
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Total value: $600
1996 (twice) and 1999
: Honour Roll
Simon Fraser University, Canada
1996–2000: Open Scholarship
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Full tuition support
1995–1996: Taduesz Specht Memorial Scholarship in Science
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Total value: $3,000

Service

2017: Co-organizer: 2017 New York Computer Science and Economics Day.
2015–ongoing: Member: NSF PI Forum on Peer Assessment.
2014–2015: Student representative: Faculty Recruiting Committee.
2010: Volunteer: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Editorial Activity

2018: Program Committee, 19th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.
2018: Reviewer, Games and Economic Behavior.
2017: Program Committee, 27th International World Wide Web Conference.
2017: Program Committee, Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
2017: Program Committee, 18th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.
2017: Reviewer, Thirty-First Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
2017: Reviewer, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
2016: Program Committee, Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
2016: Reviewer, Econometrica.
2016: Reviewer, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
2016: Reviewer, 12th Conference on Web and Internet Economics.
2016: Reviewer, Artificial Intelligence Journal.
2016: Reviewer, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
2015: Reviewer, Games and Economic Behavior.
2015: Reviewer, Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
2015: Reviewer, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
2015: Reviewer, ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation.
2013: Reviewer, Journal of Machine Learning Research.
2012: Reviewer, Games and Economic Behavior.
2011: Reviewer, Artificial Intelligence Journal.
2011: Reviewer, International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence.
2011: Reviewer, Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
2010: Reviewer, Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
2009: Reviewer, ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce.
2009: External reviewer, International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence.

Research Employment

2018–: Assistant Professsor
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada