Kevin Leyton-Brown

Department of Computer Science

University of British Columbia

Dr. Kevin Leyton-Brown has demonstrated remarkable international leadership during the past decade in the areas of game theory, auction design, and empirical algorithmics. Game theory studies what happens when strategic interests collide. The internet facilitates a wide range of interactions and electronic commerce that are larger and more complex than traditional analysis can handle. Leyton-Brown’s research aims to extend such analysis to internet scale. It focuses on computational tools, auctions, and fast algorithms for solving hard problems. His key contributions to computational game theory include the first representation language for describing large, general settings in which all players interact; algorithms for efficiently answering game theoretic questions; and novel methods for predicting human behavior in strategic situations. He has developed novel algorithms for complex multi-good auctions that have had wide impact in electronic commerce companies and government, including the top contender for use in the US FCC’s upcoming, $50 billion “incentive auction” of radio spectrum. He has also developed the first methods for using machine learning to characterize algorithm performance, as well as developing some of the world’s fastest constraint-solving algorithms.

Kevin is the coauthor of two widely adopted and widely cited textbooks on multiagent systems and game theory. He has cotaught the most popular online course on Game Theory that enrolled a quarter-million students spanning 98% of the world’s countries. He has won 5 best paper awards in the past three years; two Google Faculty Research Awards; and 22 medals in 5 international SAT competitions (2003–2012). Kevin has worked for seven different startup companies since 1999, including Vancouver-based Zite, which was acquired by CNN. Kevin’s students have won over two dozen graduate fellowships and awards, including three best PhD thesis awards. He is currently associate editor at three top journals (AIJ, JAIR, ACM-TEAC) and was recently program co-chair of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce.