Kevin Leyton-Brown

Kevin Leyton-Brown

Professor

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

2366 Main Mall, Room X565

Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4

604-822-1453 (phone)

604-822-5485 (fax)

Brief biography

Curriculum Vitae

Photo credit: Martin Lipman and NSERC

Some Recent News

Edelman Award Winner I'm part of a big team that just won the 2018 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. My (current and former) PhD students Neil Newman and Alexandre Fréchette were also awarded. Described as "the leading O.R. and analytics award in the industry" the award recognizes a "completed, practical application that had significant, verifiable and quantifiable impact on the performance of [a] client organization," in this case the US Federal Communications Commission. See some brief, slick videos describing what we did: (1, 2, 3).
AAAI Fellow I was one of eight researchers elected to be a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2018.
PNAS Paper With Paul Milgrom and Ilya Segal, I published a recent paper in PNAS. It also received some press coverage (1,2).

Schedule If you'd like to meet, please check my free-busy calendar before proposing a time.

Academic Affiliations I'm a member of the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia. I'm an associate member of the Vancouver School of Economics, and am affiliated with the Institute for Computing, Information & Cognitive Systems (ICICS), the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS), the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI) and the Bioinformatics, and Empirical & Theoretical Algorithmics Laboratory (BETA lab). I participate in the Game Theory and Decision Theory Seminar (GT-DT), the Empirical Algorithmics Reading Group (EARG), and the LCI forum. I'm a faculty associate at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

Past Academic Affiliations In 2016 I was a long-term visitor at the Simons Institute program on Algorithms and Uncertainty, at UC Berkeley, and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England. In 2015 I was a long-term visitor at the Simons Institute program on Economics and Computation, at UC Berkeley. On my 2010–11 sabbatical I visited Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute for Advanced Studies. I'm a former member of Yoav Shoham's Multiagent Group in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of Stanford University's Department of Computer Science.

Industry Affiliations I currently advise Auctionomics, Inc. (and through them, the Federal Communications Commission), OneChronos, and Qudos, Inc. I have co-founded two companies: Kudu.ug and Meta-Algorithmic Technologies. In the past, I served as a consultant for Zynga, Inc., Trading Dynamics Inc., Ariba Inc., Cariocas Inc., and was scientific advisor to Vancouver-based Zite Inc. until it was acquired by CNN in 2011.

Editorial I am chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIG-Ecom). I am an associate editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (ACM-TEAC), and AI Access, and an Advisory Board member for the Journal of AI Research (JAIR). I was program chair for ACM-EC in 2012, and have been tutorial chair for IJCAI, AAAI and ACM-EC. I've guest edited for Games and Economic Behavior (GEB), ACM-TEAC, and AI Magazine. I have been an area chair for IJCAI, served on senior program committees at AAAI, AAMAS, ACM-EC, IJCAI, and UAI, and on program committees at AMEC, AMMA, CP, CROCS, TADA.

Books I coauthored Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations, and Essentials of Game Theory: A Concise, Multidisciplinary Introduction, both with Yoav Shoham.

Graduate Students and Postdocs My current students are: Chris Cameron (PhD); Jason Hartford (PhD; MSc 2016); Neil Newman (PhD; MSc 2016); Hedeyat Zarkoob (PhD). Alice Gao and Lars Kotthoff are current postdocs, and Frank Hutter is a former postdoc (left 2013) My past graduate students are: James Wright (PhD 2016); Steve Ramage (MSc 2015); David Thompson (PhD 2015; MSc. 2007); Alexandre Fréchette (left for Google); Lin Xu (PhD 2014); Baharak Rastegari (PhD 2013); Chris Thornton (MSc 2012); Albert Xin Jiang (PhD 2011; MSc. 2006), Chris Nell (MSc. 2011), James Wright (MSc. 2010); Frank Hutter (PhD 2009); Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh (MSc. 2009); Erik Zawadzki (MSc. 2008; BSc. Hon 2006); Asher Lipson (MSc. 2005).

Prospective Students For students not enrolled at UBC: please do not contact me directly; instead, apply to my department and indicate an interest in working with me. You can learn about my research area from my free online class. I am likely to take on new PhD students from outside UBC only when I am already familiar with their publications from conferences that I attend. I am likely to take on other students for an MSc with the possibility of continuing to a PhD. For students who are already at UBC: please take my grad class and drop by GT-DT if you're interested in game theory/multiagent systems, or take Holger Hoos' grad class and drop by EARG if you're interested in empirical algorithmics.