Ahmed Abdelmeged's dissertation has been completed with the help of the Comprehensive exam committee.
It is the advisor's opinion that the dissertation is outstanding because of the amount of abstraction and invention that had to be accomplished given the sea of game data from synthetic semantic games. Discovering the right definitions and theorems and proving them can be done only by a few PhD students. The notion of collusion resilience, to prevent malicious attacks, seems to be new in Social Choice Theory.
Thomas Wahl has indicated several months ago that he would like to have Ravi Sundaram on the committee. I have taken that advice seriously and given Ravi summaries on what Ahmed is doing through the past year. It was Ravi who brought the connection to Social Choice Theory to our attention. Ravi also judged the ``interestingness'' of Ahmed's results.
Ravi has graciously agreed to serve on the committee and check the crucial chapter 4. The reasons for chosing Ravi are: Ravi knows about social choice theory, game theory, and tournaments. He knows about a lot of different computational problems which could be all represented in our system. Ravi knows the connections between algorithms, logical sentences and their Skolem functions and semantic games.
The Comprehensive Committee members have made significant contributions to the current and final draft. For example, Yizhou Sun suggested synthetic avatars (debaters) which eventually triggered the abstraction of collusion resilience. But the synthetic avatars and the experimental results they created have been removed from the dissertation.
We had several meetings also with Casper Harteveld where he gave important guidance. Casper published a recent paper on "The research and evaluation of serious games: Toward a comprehensive methodology" in the British Journal of Educational Technology in 2014. Ahmed's work has grown up in the educational domain where we designed dozens of labs (serious games) for both undergraduate and graduate classes. The tradeoff issues that Ahmed mentions in chapter 3 beautifully summarize much of our serious game design experiences. It is very good to have Casper on board although the evaluation in Ahmed's dissertation turned theoretical. But the theory is used to explain why our system works well (in the class room).
A short description of his work is on the above home page.
Ahmed's dissertation brings together three areas: (1) Social choice theory (axiomatic treatment of ranking functions for tournaments of side-choosing games) (Ravi Sundaram) (2) Programming languages and formal methods (declarative programming for the global brain using generalized semantic games) (Thomas Wahl), (3) Game design for serious games, educational perspective (Casper Harteveld).
-- Karl Lieberherr, April 16, 2014.