SCSE Outstanding PhD Thesis Award 2021

Congratulations to the following PhD graduates for their achievement!

Winner 
for contributions to algorithms for equilibrium computation in multiplayer games and their applications

Dr ZHANG Youzhi
Computing Team-Maxmin Equilibria in Zero-Sum Multiplayer Games

Citation: 
Efficiently computing Nash equilibria for multiplayer games is an open challenge in computational game theory. Zhang’s thesis focuses on computing team-maxmin equilibria and includes a thorough study of the team-maxmin equilibrium computation in both normal-form and extensive-form zero-sum multiplayer games. In both games, his thesis presented efficient general algorithms and the application of the team-maxmin equilibrium to real-world problems with efficient domain-specific algorithms. Zhang proposed the first incremental strategy generation algorithm guaranteeing to converge to a team-maxmin equilibrium. He also introduced various novel components for the incremental strategy generation algorithm to improve scalability, e.g., best response oracles on how to efficiently compute the best response in various scenarios. Based on the thesis work, a collaboration with the Singapore Police Force is underway to apply these algorithms to interdict speeding offenders on highways. 

 

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Runner-Up
for contributions to the development and theoretical analysis of weakly supervised learning algorithms.

Dr FENG Lei 
Advanced Topics in Weakly Supervised Learning

Citation: 
Weakly supervised learning, which aims to build predictive models by learning with limited supervision information, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Lei Feng’s doctoral thesis is devoted to investigating two advanced topics in weakly supervised learning including complementary-label learning and partial label learning. He not only developed effective learning algorithms that outperformed the state-of-the-art counterparts on various benchmark datasets, but also provided theoretical analysis of learning algorithms. 

 

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Jury 2021

Assoc Prof Sinno Pan (Jury Chair)

Asst Prof Arijit Khan

Asst Prof Li Yi

Assoc Prof A S Madhukumar

 

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