Date:
Location:
CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, April 20, 2015
Time: 11:30am – 1:00pm
Place: 33 Oxford St., Maxwell Dworkin 119
Speaker: CRCS Fellow Rafael (Raf) Frongillo
Title: Designing Adaptive Prediction Markets
Abstract: Prediction markets are a widely-used, accurate, engaging, and intuitive way to crowdsource probabilistic predictions of various outcomes, from basketball tournaments to political elections. Constructed as financial markets for securities whose payoffs depend on the outcomes in question, prediction markets aggregate the beliefs of the crowd by offering well-aligned financial incentives, allowing one to interpret the market price as a consensus prediction.
Biography: Rafael Frongillo is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University. His research lies at the interface between theoretical machine learning and economics, primarily focusing on domains such as information elicitation and crowdsourcing which involve the exchange of information for money, and drawing techniques from convex analysis, game theory, optimization, and statistics. Before coming to Harvard, Rafael was a postdoc at Microsoft Research New York, and in 2013 received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, advised by Christos Papadimitriou and supported by the NDSEG Fellowship.