CSE Colloquium: Fei Fang

Title: Empower the Defender with Unpredictability: Game-Theoretic Approaches for Real-World Security and Sustainability Challenges

Abstract: 

The framework of game theory can be powerful when addressing resource allocation problems in security and sustainability domains, e.g., protecting critical infrastructure and cyber network, and protecting wildlife, fishery and forest. Motivated by these problems, I propose models and algorithms to handle massive games with complex spatio-temporal settings, leading to real-world applications that have fundamentally altered current practices of security resource allocation.

First, focusing on games where actions are taken over continuous time (for example games with moving targets such as ferries and refugee supply lines), I provide an efficient solution while accurately modeling the continuous action space. Second, for problems with repeated interaction such as preventing poaching and illegal fishing, I introduce the green security game model which accounts for adversaries’ behavior change and provide algorithms to plan effective sequential defender strategies. Third, I incorporate complex terrain information and design PAWS (Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security) which generates patrol routes to combat poaching. The applications of my game-theoretic algorithms include deployments for protecting the Staten Island Ferry in New York City (used by the US Coast Guard) and for tiger conservation in Southeast Asia.

Bio:

Fei Fang is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and expects to receive her degree in May 2016. Her research lies in the field of artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems, focusing on computational game theory with applications to security and sustainability domains. Her work has won the Deployed Application Award at Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI’16), the Outstanding Paper Award in Computational Sustainability Track at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’15). She is the recipient of WiSE Merit Fellowship (2014) and she has been awarded the Meritorious Team Commendation from Commandant of the US Coast Guard.