Georgios Chalkiadakis
Professor at Technical University of Crete
Current mobility-as-a-service platforms have departed from the original objectives of the sharing economy-inspired social ridesharing paradigm: regrettably, they view drivers as taxi workers; focus on profit maximization rather than fair travel costs’ allocation; and disregard essential private preferences of users (relating for instance to their feeling of safety, comfort, and their enjoyment of a ride experience). At the same time, accommodation booking platforms do not address the relationship between fairness and pricing policy, and do not contribute to mitigating profiteering and the social impacts of overtourism (such as reducing the availability of affordable housing prices for local residents). However, we claim that multiagent systems and related disciplines research can contribute to solutions for these problem domains that are trustworthy, ethical, and beneficial to all stakeholders. With this in mind, we propose a research framework and methodology that combines game theory, social choice theory, recommender systems, and multiagent collaboration and learning solutions, to address the aforementioned issues, in line with TAILOR’s H1, H2, and V2 research objectives. As such, we aim to offer trustworthy, fair, ethical, and beneficial-to-all solutions in (mainly) two important AI and MAS-related application paradigms: the ridesharing and hospitality industries.
Keywords: ridesharing, social preferences, multi-sided fairness, mechanism design, cooperative game theory, social choice, recommender systems, sharing economy, overtourism
Scientific area: Multiagent Systems
Bio: Professor Georgios Chalkiadakis is a faculty member of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Technical University of Crete since 2012. His research interests lie mainly in the area of Multiagent Systems (MAS); and more specifically on decision making under uncertainty and machine learning (especially reinforcement learning) in MAS environments, coalition formation and cooperation in MAS, and cooperative game theory. He is highly interested in building AI and MAS systems that are trustworthy and truly beneficial to humans and their societies. He is a co-author of the graduate level textbook “Computational Aspects of Cooperative Game Theory” (Morgan and Claypool, 2011). He has also co-authored 3 book chapters in scientific collections, and more than 100 research papers in journals and conferences in his areas of expertise (several of which have received awards or award nominations). He has so far graduated 2 PhD, 12 MSc, and 46 MEng-level students. Georgios has participated in 17 European or national research projects (including one ongoing ERC project). Georgios is currently the PI of DEEP-REBAYES, a basic AI research project on intertwining deep reinforcement learning, Bayesian learning, and game theory, which is funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. He has been a project reviewer/evaluator for five national research agencies. He has served in the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). Between 2020-2022 he served as the Chair of the European Association for Multi-Agent Systems (EURAMAS), while between 2019-2020 he was the EURAMAS Deputy Chair. Between 2015 and 2019 Georgios served as the General Secretary of the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society (EETN). More details on Georgios and his research can be found at: http://www.intelligence.tuc.gr/~gehalk
Visiting period: March 1, 2024 – June 30, 2024 at IIIA-CSIC