Strategic Information Transmission and Deception

Abstract

Strategic information transmission refers to a variation (and a substantial one) of the standard paradigm of information transmission in communication (design of an encoder and a decoder in unison to minimize some distortion measure), where now the encoder and the decoder have (intentionally) misaligned objectives. This leads to a non-cooperative game with a dynamic (non-classical) information structure, where one can adopt as a solution concept either the Nash or the Stackelberg equilibrium. This talk will introduce this class of problems, which have been of interest to multiple communities, including economics, information theory, communication, signal processing, and control, having picked up considerable steam very recently. As an overview of the topic, both old and new results will be presented, with one of the highlights (and perhaps a surprising element) being that there appears to be a major difference between the structures of the solutions under Nash and Stackelberg equilibria, even when the channel is Gaussian and the (misaligned) distortion measures are quadratic. Strategic information transmission is an important underlying feature of deception games, which will be highlighted in the talk, as well as non-trivial extensions to multi-stage scenarios, with adversarial intrusion and elements of deception.

(This is based on joint work with Emrah Akyol, Cedric Langbort, and Muhammed Sayin)

Biography

Tamer Başar has been with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1981, where he holds the academic positions of Swanlund Endowed Chair; Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Professor, Coordinated Science Laboratory; Professor, Information Trust Institute; and Affiliate Professor, Mechanical Science and Engineering. He is also the Director of the Center for Advanced Study. At Illinois, he has also served as Interim Dean of Engineering and Interim Director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the European Academy of Sciences; Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and SIAM; a past president of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), the founding president of the International Society of Dynamic Games (ISDG), and a past president of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC). He has received several awards and recognitions over the years, including the highest awards of IEEE CSS, IFAC, AACC, and ISDG, the IEEE Control Systems Technical Field Award, and a number of international honorary doctorates and professorships, most recently an honorary doctorate from KTH, Sweden. He has over 900 publications in systems, control, communications, optimization, and dynamic games, including books on non-cooperative dynamic game theory, robust control, network security, wireless and communication networks, and stochastic networks. He was Editor-in-Chief of the IFAC Journal Automatica between 2004 and 2014, and is currently editor of several book series. His current research interests include stochastic teams, games, and networks; multi-agent systems and learning; data-driven distributed optimization; security and trust; energy systems; and cyber-physical systems.