Bayen Presents Gilbreth Lecture

September 14, 2017

ITS Director Alexandre Bayen was selected to give an NAE Gilbreth Lecture Feb. 9, 2017 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA.

The Gilbreth Lectures, established in 2001 by the Council of the National Academy of Engineering, recognizes outstanding young American engineers and increases visibility to the NAE membership. 

Lectureship recipients are nominated from the Frontiers of Engineering program and have the opportunity to make presentations at NAE’s fall Annual Meetings and spring National Meetings.  The Gilbreth Lectureships are named in honor of Lillian Gilbreth, the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering (1965) and a pioneer in the field of Human Factors. 

Bayen presented Distributed Learning Dynamics Convergence in Routing Games, covering how routing games offer a simple yet powerful model of congestion in traffic networks — both in transportation and communication systems. The talk explained how congestion is affected by combined decisions of the drivers or routers, and modeling the decision process is important — not only to estimate and predict the behavior of the system, but also to control it. The talk presented a study of how different models of learning dynamics should converge asymptotically to a Nash equilibrium of the game. The talk also presented experimental results obtained with an online gaming application, where distributed players can play the routing game, connecting to the web app and participate in the game by iteratively making decisions about their routes and observing outcomes.

2017 was a good year for UC Berkeley, as Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Ana Arias also presented an NAE Gilbreth lecture, giving UC Berkeley two of the four speakers slots. Go Bears!