Speakers

Philip N. Brown, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

A Little Anarchy Never Hurt Anyone: Beyond Worst-Case Equilibria in Games

Philip N. Brown is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and a Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Torino (2026). Philip received the Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 2007 from Georgia Tech, the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering in 2015 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara under the supervision of Jason R. Marden. He received the 2018 CCDC Best PhD Thesis Award from UCSB, the Best Paper Award from GameNets 2021, and early-career awards from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (YIP, 2023), National Science Foundation (CAREER, 2025), and the Army Research Office (ECP, 2025). Philip is interested in complex strategic interactions in networked systems of agents, and studies these with a combination of game theory and machine learning. Key application areas include smart transportation systems, human-machine teaming, and space domain awareness.

Sarah H. Q. Li, Georgia Tech

Leadership without Commitment: Time Inconsistency in Dynamic Games

Sarah H. Q. Li is an assistant professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she leads the Control, Coordination, and Competition under Uncertainty (C3U) Lab. She received her Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, and completed her postdoc with the Autonomous Control Lab at ETH Zurich. Her work combines optimal control, stochastic decision processes, and game theory to study how autonomous agents can coordinate safely and efficiently in uncertain environments.

Jason R. Marden, University of California, Santa Barbara

Mechanism Design for Societal Systems: Equilibria, Dynamics, and the Gap Between Them

Jason R. Marden is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jason received a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 2001 from UCLA, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2007, also from UCLA. After graduating from UCLA, he served as a junior fellow in the Social and Information Sciences Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology until 2010 when he joined the University of Colorado as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering. In 2015, Jason joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jason is an IEEE Fellow (2024) and recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award (2015), NSF Career Award (2014), AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2012), American Automatic Control Council Donald P. Eckman Award (2012), and the SIAM/SGT Best Sicon Paper Award (2015). Jason’s research interests focus on game theoretic methods for the control of distributed multiagent systems.

Sarah Dean, Cornell University

Reconciling Engagement, Harm, and Utility on Recommendation-driven Platforms

Sarah Dean is an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University. She studies the interplay between optimization, machine learning, and dynamics in real-world systems. Her research focuses on understanding the fundamentals of data-driven methods for control and decision-making, inspired by applications ranging from robotics to recommendation systems. She completed her postdoctoral research at the University of Washington and earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Dean received her B.S.E. in electrical engineering and mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the recipient of a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship and a NSF CAREER Award.

Mengbin (Ben) Ye, Adelaide University

Modelling Conspiracy Belief Discussion Dynamics using Experimental Chatroom Data

Mengbin (Ben) Ye received the BE degree (with First Class Honours) in mechanical engineering from the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 2013, and the PhD degree in engineering at the Australian National University, Australia in 2018. From 2018-2020, he was a postdoctoral researcher with the Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen, Netherlands. He joined Curtin University, Australia, in 2020 and held a four-year Western Australia Premier’s Early Career Fellowship from 2021-2025. In 2025, he joined Adelaide University, Australia, as a Senior Lecturer, and holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA). He was awarded the J.G. Crawford Prize (Interdisciplinary) in 2018, ANU’s premier award recognizing graduate research excellence, and received the 2018 Springer PhD Thesis Prize. His current research interests include dynamics on social networks, and epidemic modelling and control.

Jeff S. Shamma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Learning Dynamics: The Anti-Hero of Equilibrium Selection

Jeff S. Shamma is Department Head of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and Jerry S. Dobrovolny Chair at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He previously held faculty positions at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and at Georgia Tech as the Julian T. Hightower Chair in Systems and Controls. Jeff received a PhD in Systems Science and Engineering from MIT in 1988. He is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC, a past Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and a recipient of the IFAC High Impact Paper Award, AACC Donald P. Eckman Award, and NSF Young Investigator Award. Jeff has been a plenary/semi-plenary speaker at NeurIPS, World Congress of the Game Theory Society, and IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. He was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems from 2020-2024. Jeff’s research focuses on decision and control, game theory, and multi-agent systems.

Francesca Parise, Cornell University

Learning Dynamics in Markov Potential Games

Francesca Parise joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in July 2020. Before then, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. She defended her PhD at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2016 and she received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Information and Automation Engineering in 2010 and 2012, from the University of Padova, Italy, where she simultaneously attended the Galilean School of Excellence. Her research focuses on analysis and control of large multi-agent systems, with application to transportation, energy, social and economic networks. Francesca was recognized as an EECS rising star in 2017 and is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the 2024 AFOSR YIP, the Guglielmo Marin Award from the “Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti”, the SNSF Early Postdoc Fellowship, the SNSF Advanced Postdoc Fellowship and the ETH Medal for her doctoral work.

Anuradha Annaswamy, Massachussetts Institute of Technology

Control without Borders: An Optimization Perspective for a Class of Problems in Socio-technical Systems

Anuradha Annaswamy is Founder and Director of the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Her research interests span adaptive control theory and its applications to aerospace, automotive, propulsion, and energy systems as well as cyber physical systems such as Smart Grids, Smart Cities, and Smart Infrastructures. She has received best paper awards (Axelby, 1986; CSM, 2010), as well as Distinguished Member and Distinguished Lecturer awards from the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), best paper award from the IFAC journal Annual Reviews in Control for 2021-23, and a Presidential Young Investigator award from NSF, 1991-97. She is a Fellow of IEEE and International Federation of Automatic Control. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni award from Indian Institute of Science. She received the IEEE Control Systems Technology Award from CSS in 2024.

Robert N. Shorten, Imperial College London

Algorithmic Fairness by Design

Robert N. Shorten received his Ph.D. degree from University College Dublin, Ireland in 1997. From 1993 to 1997, he was employed, and the Holder of a Marie Curie Fellowship, with Daimler-Benz Berlin, Germany, where he conducted research in the area of smart gearbox systems. Following a brief period with the Centre for Systems Science, Yale University, where he worked with Prof. K. S. Narendra, he returned to Ireland as the holder of a European Presidency Fellowship in 1997. He co-founded the Hamilton Institute in 2001 at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland, where he was a Full Professor until 2016. Professor Shorten has been a research visitor at Technion and Yale University, and a visiting Professor at TU Berlin, Germany. From 2013-2016 he was seconded to IBM Research where he led the Optimization, Control and Decision Sciences team in the Smarter Cities Research Center. From 2016 he was a Professor at University College Dublin, and until 2019 held a part-time role with IBM Research. Professor Shorten currently holds the Chair in Cyber-Physical Systems Design in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London. He is currently Head of School at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, a Co-Director of the Centre for Sectoral Economic Growth at Imperial College London, and the academic lead (ICL) for the TU Munich-Imperial alliance. He is also a former Chair of the Board of Directors at Future Mobility Campus Ireland, is the current CTO and founder of the electric mobility company Go Eve, the current global co-lead for climate and sustainability for the AI Alliance, and currently serves in the FIA’s (Federation Internationale de l’Automobile) Global Advisory Panel.