Ezzat Elokda and Florian Dörfler
Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Talk: Just Good KARMA: How We're Driving Fairness and Efficiency in Mobility and Beyond
Socio-technical control systems commonly rely on monetary instruments to incentivize efficient behaviors, which lead to fairness concerns since users have varying capacities and sensitivities to money. In this talk, we demonstrate that it is possible to leverage repetition and dynamics to devise incentives in an endogenous and thereby fair manner, using karma economies. Karma is a non-tradable credit that flows from users gaining public resources to users yielding resources in an auction-like mechanism, which incentivizes users to claim resources when they are most urgent. We formalize karma economies as Dynamic Population Games (DPGs) in which a Stationary Nash Equilibrium (SNE) is guaranteed to exist. We then demonstrate the superior fairness and efficiency of karma in comparison to classical monetary pricing control in the example of morning commute congestion management. Lastly, we discuss practical implementation aspects of karma, guided by the results of controlled behavorial experiments with real humans.
Bio: Ezzat Elokda is a PhD student under the supervision of Florian Dörfler and Emilio Frazzoli at ETH Zurich, since October 2020. His research focuses on aligning intelligent socio-technical systems with social objectives and combines techniques from control theory, game theory, and welfare economics. His PhD is funded by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation. He received the B.ASc. In Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 2014, and the M.Sc. in Robotics, Systems \& Control at ETH Zurich in 2020. From 2014-2018, he held various control engineering positions at process automation and lifting equipment companies. He is the recipient of the IFAC CPHS Young Author Award in 2024, and the ETH Silver Medal in 2021.
Bio: Florian Dörfler is a Professor at the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zürich. He received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2013, and a Diplom degree in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart in 2008. From 2013 to 2014 he was an Assistant Professor at the University of California Los Angeles. He has been serving as the Associate Head of the ETH Zürich Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering from 2021 until 2022. His research interests are centered around automatic control, system theory, optimization, and learning. His particular foci are on network systems, data-driven settings, and applications to power systems. He is a recipient of the distinguished young research awards by IFAC (Manfred Thoma Medal 2020) and EUCA (European Control Award 2020). He and his team received the best paper distinctions in the top venues of control, machine learning, power systems, power electronics, circuits, and systems. They were recipients of the 2011 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, the 2012-2014 Automatica Best Paper Award, the 2016 IEEE Circuits and Systems Guillemin-Cauer Best Paper Award, the 2022 IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Prize Paper Award, the 2024 Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award, and multiple Best PhD thesis awards at UC Santa Barbara and ETH Zürich. They were further winners or finalists for Best Student Paper awards at the European Control Conference (2013, 2019), the American Control Conference (2010,2016,2024), the Conference on Decision and Control (2020), the PES General Meeting (2020), the PES PowerTech Conference (2017), the International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (2021), the IEEE CSS Swiss Chapter Young Author Best Journal Paper Award (2022,2024), the IFAC Conferences on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (2024) and Cyber-Physical-Human Systems (2024), and NeurIPS Oral (2024). He is currently serving on the council of the European Control Association and as a senior editor of Automatica.