Game Theory Update

One of the classes I’m attend­ing is Prof. Ari­jit Sen’s famous class on Game Theory.

Prof. Sen is if you remem­ber is my favourite pro­fes­sor here. This time, here is another gem from the exten­sive class notes and read­ing mate­r­ial he hands out before class.

This is from an extended exam­ple about ana­lyz­ing and solv­ing co-​​ordination prob­lems using Game The­ory. The exam­ple talks about two researchers Bob and Alice work­ing on a paper from two remote loca­tions. The final para­graph (each para­graph is a sep­a­rate co-​​ordinaton problem).

June 29^th, 3 pm: Their paper has been accepted for pub­li­ca­tion. In an elated state of mind, each is now plan­ning to go for a vaca­tion either to a Napa Val­ley resort or to a Santa Bar­bara beach resort. But here, they face the fol­low­ing prob­lem. Dur­ing their col­lab­o­ra­tion, Bob has come to enjoy Alice’s com­pany so much that he wants to go to the same resort that Alice will be going to. Alice, on the other hand, con­sid­ers Bob to be a good pro­fes­sional col­league but not a ‘close friend’. Want­ing to keep things that way, she does not want to go to the same resort as Bob, but nei­ther does she want to tell this to Bob and hurt his feel­ings. Given that they are select­ing their vaca­tion des­ti­na­tions sit­ting in their respec­tive lab­o­ra­to­ries, how should they choose?

Term 4 at IIMC

I’ve been putting off writ­ing this blog post for some time now. But here it is. After being unfaith­ful to this blog and mean­der­ing in many direc­tions I return to give you a long post about sec­ond year at IIM Calcutta.

I spent the 4^th semes­ter at IIM Cal­cutta tak­ing a mam­moth 6 sub­jects and also writ­ing a term paper with Priya Now for place­ments in IIM Cal­cutta your marks are frozen till term 4 (that is your term 4 rank is every­thing for final place­ments) so every­one puts max fight in order to do the best they can. My way of doing that was to play to my my strengths (d’uh!), which meant I chose sub­jects involv­ing tech­nol­ogy and busi­ness strategy. 

So my course list turned out to be

1. “Busi­ness Inte­gra­tion using IT” (Prof. Monideepa Tarafdar) – decent course with lots of cases about IT usage at “inte­gra­tion points”

2. “Com­pu­ta­tion Intel­li­gence in Finance” – where we stud­ied AI tools to build finan­cial indi­ca­tors and the like. The prof com­pli­cated this sub­ject too much for me (since I have no prior knowl­edge to AI) but over­all I learnt how such things could poten­tially be used in quant-​​jocking. I’m not sure I will be able to do it myself.

3. “Ser­vices HRM” : I took this course because I thought it wont be too much work. I didnt expect to really like it either. As it turns out I was wrong on both counts. I like it a lot (it deals with the pres­sures faced by front line staff and the like) – it was a good com­bi­na­tion of psych-​​stuff and strat­egy. Nice cases too. We also did a field report by vis­it­ing how Sub­way designed their HR sys­tem to ensure that their front­line is not too stressed out.

4. Prod­uct Man­age­ment : IIM Cal­cutta fac­ulty in mar­ket­ing is really ter­ri­ble. This course exem­pli­fies that. I took this course think­ing it would be the kind of prod­uct man­age­ment that a PM or an APM at Google/​Microsoft does. Turn out it was more for the HLL guy who is in charge of Sun­silk. Even in that scope the guy did a ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble job. I know noth­ing more about prod­uct man­age­ment after this course. My only take away was that I got an A.

5. “Busi­ness Data Min­ing” : Absolutely loved this course. Talks about using stats to find pat­terns in data. The pro­fes­sors kept the mate­r­ial sim­ple and approach­able and focused on hands-​​on prob­lem solv­ing. The small class size helped.

6. “Analy­sis of ICT Mar­kets”: This was a new course which talks about infor­ma­tion com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies. Basi­cally a lot of dis­cus­sion and debate on pub­lic pol­icy in these areas. Stuff like should reg­u­la­tors allow new play­ers in tele­phony, num­ber porta­bil­ity, net neu­tral­ity etc. My take­away from the course was that I had great dis­cus­sion twice a week on things that I am really keyed into. Not sure I per­son­ally “learnt” more after this. Got a ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble grade in this which screwed my term CG – but I dunno what else I could’ve done.

7. “Term paper”: The term paper that I wrote is called “DO WIKI-PAGES HAVE PAR­ENTS? AN ARTI­CLE-LEVEL INQUIRY INTO WIKIPEDIA’S INEQUAL­I­TIES”. What I essen­tially did was culled edit his­tory from wikipedia and used that as my dataset. Our hypothe­ses were that a) wiki-​​pages are shep­herded by a few users, their “par­ents” and b) such par­ented pages are bet­ter in qual­ity than the orphans. We found solid sup­port only for a). The biggest take­away was that this got accepted at WITS 2009 ( a decently high-​​level conf held in asso­ci­a­tion with ICIS, the biggest, most impor­tant conf in the area) in Phoenix,AZ where I am headed in December.

So that con­cluded the aca­d­e­mic sum­mary of my term 4. This term also marked the entry of a whole new clan of 400 IIMCians – the 46^th batch. Felt weird at first watch­ing how the same things hap­pen over and over again. Its kinda like that snowflake frac­tal (the Koch curve) – small repeat­ing pat­terns that make the whole thing quite spectacular.

The term I did noth­ing more than write reports for each of the classes above. Very tir­ing! We also recruited a super team at joka​times​.com and I worked in vain to get things mov­ing at the IIMC–web­site revamp. And pre­pared stu­pid doc­u­men­ta­tion for my stu­dent exchange in Bel­gium. (at UC Lou­vain )

The next post will have more details on my trip here.