Tanja Brown, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and a research assistant in BYU's interdisciplinary IDeA Labs, received a 2009 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her research proposal entitled "Cooperative Differential Games." The three-year fellowship, which provides a $30,000 annual stipend, $10,500 cost-of-education allowance and travel funds, is highly competitive, designed to recognize the top science, technology, engineering, and math graduate students nationwide.
Tanja's research explores cooperation and conflict in competitive environments, such as the marketplace, where, for example, we see firms merging and restructuring to form more efficient modes of cooperation to better compete with their rivals. The dynamics of these kinds of systems are effectively modeled as multi-agent systems, and properties of the communication and interaction networks characterizing each system lead to interesting questions about the resulting system behavior. For example, can particular teams dominate the system? Under what conditions will the team structure, or "industrial organization," of the system approach a fixed structure?
She is especially concerned with situations where agents can belong to multiple coalitions simultaneously, and where they can change their loyalties over time. This raises questions about system stability and security if agents are deceptive (i.e. declare loyalty to certain coalitions when they really behave to promote other coalitions), if communication between agents is bandwidth-limited, or if agents have varying degrees of computational power available to make local decisions. A critical issue is understanding how to create incentives so that self-serving agents end up working together for the greater good of the entire system. The theory she is developing will have implications for understanding complex networked
systems in a variety of settings.
Tanja will be presenting her first paper on this topic at the American Control Conference this summer. The paper, entitled "Stability Robustness Conditions for Gradient Play Differential Games with Partial Participation in Coalitions," is coauthored with another IDeA Labs student, Nghia Tran, and their advisor, Prof. Sean Warnick.