Everyone is welcome to attend the CWI lecture of Tim Baarslag. Abstract:
In this talk, I will introduce a problem from search theory called
Pandora's Problem. The problem deals with optimizing reward while
searching through boxes with uncertain prizes, which can be uncovered
against certain costs. Pandora's Problem not only has a wide range of
possible applications, it also has a surprisingly elegant and optimal
solution. I will provide some intuition behind the solution and then
show an application of this technique in the form of a negotiating agent
that can adapt itself to the user by incrementally eliciting the user's
preferences. This yields an optimal elicitation strategy that decides,
at every stage of the negotiation, how much additional user information
to extract while avoiding elicitation fatigue.
