Abstract of Talk: It is becoming increasingly important for cellular network operators to optimize technological decisions for business success. For example, an operator wants to maximize his economic return when deciding the choices and timings of 4G technology adoptions. But such an optimization will be challenging when the operator faces immature technology, user subscription dynamics, and market competition. The first part of this technical talk analyzes competitive operators’ timing of 4G upgrades considering all these challenges, and develops a game theoretic model for studying operators’ interactions. The second part of this talk turns to the perspective of smartphone users in cellular networks. We study how to motivate massive smartphones to acquire sensitive data (e.g., GPS coordinates), which is essential to build location-based applications (e.g., live map of auto traffics). This part optimally designs incentive mechanisms even when users’ collaboration costs (e.g., privacy loss and energy consumption) are unknown.

In the last an hour, Prof. Duan will also introduce PhD program (http://esd.sutd.edu.sg) in Engineering Systems and Design (ESD) Pillar at SUTD. Established in collaboration with MIT, such a program provides students with a strong technical foundation and puts an emphasis on inter-disciplinary research. ESD faculty are engaged in leading edge research in a wide range of disciplines including optimization, stochastic modeling, game theory, economics, control science, system dynamics, organizational and behavioral sciences. They are also engaged in important applications including supply chains, wireless communications and networking, transportation and logistics, energy and the environment, system dynamics, and financial engineering. Besides PhD program, Prof. Duan will also introduce joint SUTD-MIT two-year postdoc program. All undergraduate and postgraduate students are welcomed!

 

Speaker Bio: Lingjie Duan is an Assistant Professor in the Pillar of Engineering Systems and Design (ESD) at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), which is established in collaboration with MIT and focuses on top-tier interdisciplinary research. Prof. Duan received Ph.D. in Information Engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2012, and he was a visiting scholar in Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley in 2011. Prof. Duan currently leads the Network Economics and Optimizations Lab (NEOL) at SUTD with main research focus on nonlinear optimization and game theoretical analysis of various hot networks, especially on network economics, communications and networking. During the past few years, he has a number of top-tier international publications and his works on network economics attract ever-increasing attentions from both academia and industry. Besides serving as a TPC member of many leading conferences, he is the receipt of the SUTD-MIT International Design Center (IDC) Grant in 2012 and CUHK Global Scholarship for Research Excellence-CNOOC Grants in 2011.