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Dengji Zhao (赵登吉)
Associate Professor (Tenured)/博导/研究员
School of Information Science and Technology
ShanghaiTech University
Shanghai, China

Email: zhaodj at shanghaitech dot edu dot cn
The ShanghaiTech Multi-Agent systems Research Team (SMART)

 

Short Bio (full resume, 中文版):
  • Born in China, B.Sc. from Macau (2006), Double M.Sc. from Germany & Spain (2009), Double PhD from Australia & France (2012), Postdoc working with Makoto Yokoo (Kyushu, Japan) (2013 - 2014) and Research Fellow working with Nick Jennings (Imperial, UK) (2014 - 2017), Assistant Professor (2017/01 - 2023/01), then Associate Professor (2023/02 - ) at ShanghaiTech (Shanghai, China) and lead The ShanghaiTech Multi-Agent systems Research Team (SMART).
  • Zhao was elected as a member of the IFAAMAS Board of Directors (the chair of the sponsorship committee) in 2022, the first representative from a Chinese institution since IFAAMAS was founded in 2002. He is an Associate Editor of JAAMAS. He is a senior member of IEEE and the China Computer Federation (CCF).
  • He was program/track co-chair of DAI 2021, Workshop Track of PRICAI 2021, Competitions Track of IJCAI 2022, Demo and Competitons Track of AAMAS 2023, and Survey Track of IJCAI 2024. He is a local co-chair of WINE 2023. He was invited to give an Early Career Spotlight talk at IJCAI-ECAI 2022. He received the Best Paper awards from AAMAS 2024, PRIMA 2022, DAI 2022 and AI 2010.

News:
Research:
  • Most of Zhao’s research is on algorithmic game theory and multi-agent systems, especially mechanism design and its applications on social networks.
  • He pioneered and promoted a new trend of mechanism design on social networks since 2016, namely how to incentivize the existing participants of a game to invite new participants via their social connections. For this research challenge, Zhao’s group have made several seminal contributions in auctions, coalitional games and matching with over 30 high-quality papers. He has also contributed a blue sky paper at AAMAS 2021 to set up the related research agenda and offered four tutorials at AAAI 2022, AAMAS 2019 and IJCAI 2017/2018.
  • His team also pioneered the study of "Incentives for Early Arrival in Cooperative Games" since 2023, which is a new property proposed for online cooperative games (including cost sharing). The first result on this (Incentives for Early Arrival in Cooperative Games) has received the only Best Paper Award at AAMAS 2024.
  • He was invited to give an Early Career Spotlight talk at IJCAI-ECAI 2022. He received the Best Paper awards from AAMAS 2024, PRIMA 2022, DAI 2022 and AI 2010.

Tutorials:
  1. Dengji Zhao: New Trends in Mechanism Design for Considering Participants' Interactions (The talk recording is here). AAAI-2022, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
  2. Dengji Zhao: Mechanism Design Powered by Social Interactions. IJCAI-2019, Macau.
  3. Umberto Grandi and Dengji Zhao: Social Choice and Mechanism Design on Social Networks. AAMAS-2019, Montreal.
  4. Dengji Zhao: Diffusion Mechanism Design in Social Networks. PRICAI-2018, Nanjing.
  5. Dengji Zhao: Diffusion Mechanism Design in Social Networks. IJCAI-ECAI-2018, Stockholm.

Teaching:
  1. Introduction to Algorithmic Game Theory, Postgraduate Course.
  2. Algorithms and Data Structures, Undergraduate Course.

Academic Services:
  • Program (Co-)Chair
  • Program Committee
AAAI: 2024(SPC), 2023(SPC), 2022(SPC), 2021, 2020, 2019, 2017, 2016;
AAMAS: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021(SPC), 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013;
IJCAI: 2024(SPC), 2023(SPC), 2022, 2021(SPC), 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013;
ECAI: 2024, 2023(AC), 2020(SPC);
EC: 2024, 2023; WINE: 2023(SPC), 2022;
PRIMA: 2022, 2018(SPC); PRICAI: 2022, 2018; AMEC-TADA: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013; IAT/WI: 2018, 2017, 2015; AJCAI: 2022, 2015


Publications (my DBLP for the full list): *some reviews and presentation slides are included*
  1. Yaoxin Ge, Yao Zhang, Dengji Zhao, Zhihao Gavin Tang, Hu Fu, Pinyan Lu: Incentives for Early Arrival in Cooperative Games (Reviews, Slides) AAMAS 2024. (The Best Paper Award)
  2. Dengji Zhao: Mechanism Design Powered by Social Interactions: A Call to Arms (Early Career Spotlight Track). IJCAI-ECAI 2022.
  3. Yao Zhang, Dengji Zhao: Incentives to Invite Others to Form Larger Coalitions (Reviews). AAMAS 2022.
  4. Xiuzhen Zhang, Yao Zhang, Dengji Zhao: Task Allocation on Networks with Execution Uncertainty (Slides) PRIMA 2022. (The Best Paper Award)
  5. Bin Li, Dong Hao, Dengji Zhao: Diffusion Auction Design. Artificial Intelligence, Nov 2021.
  6. Dengji Zhao: Mechanism Design Powered by Social Interactions (Reviews, Talk, Slides). AAMAS 2021 Blue Sky Ideas Track.
  7. Yao Zhang, Dengji Zhao: Revenue Maximization in Diffusion Auctions. GAMES 2020/21.
  8. Xiuzhen Zhang, Yao Zhang, Dengji Zhao: Incentive Compatible Mechanism for Influential Agent Selection (Reviews). SAGT 2021.
  9. Tianyi Zhang, Dengji Zhao, Wen Zhang, Xuming He: Fixed-Price Diffusion Mechanism Design. PRICAI 2021.
  10. Xinyuan Lian, Dengji Zhao: A Network-based Rating Mechanism Against False-Name Attack. The 2021 Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
  11. Bin Li, Dong Hao, Dengji Zhao: Incentive-Compatible Diffusion Auctions. IJCAI 2020.
  12. Yao Zhang, Xiuzhen Zhang, Dengji Zhao: Sybil-proof Answer Querying Mechanism (Reviews). IJCAI 2020.
  13. Dengji Zhao, Yiqing Huang, Liat Cohen, Tal Grinshpoun: Coalitional Games with Stochastic Characteristic Functions Defined by Private Types. AAMAS 2020 (Extended Abstract).
  14. Wen Zhang, Yao Zhang, Dengji Zhao: Crowdsourcing Data Acquisition via Social Networks. AAMAS 2020.
  15. Wen Zhang, Dengji Zhao, Hanyu Chen: Redistribution Mechanism Design on Networks. AAMAS 2020.
  16. Wen Zhang, Dengji Zhao, Yao Zhang: Incentivize Diffusion with Fair Rewards on Networks. ECAI 2020.
  17. Haomin Shi, Yao Zhang, Zilin Si, Letong Wang, Dengji Zhao: Maximal Information Propagation with Budgets. ECAI 2020.
  18. Bin Li, Dong Hao, Dengji Zhao, Makoto Yokoo: Diffusion and Auction on Graphs. IJCAI 2019.
  19. Junping Xu, Xin He, Dengji Zhao: Double auction design on networks. DAI 2019.
  20. Dengji Zhao, Bin Li, Junping Xu, Dong Hao, Nick Jennings: Selling Multiple Items via Social Networks. (Reviews, Presentation, Poster) In the Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-18, acceptance rate 25%, 760 submissions) A typo in the key result was corrected and explained in this note or check this arXiv version.
  21. Bin Li, Dong Hao, Dengji Zhao, Tao Zhou: Customer Sharing in Economic Networks with Costs. (Reviews, Presentation, Poster) In the Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 23rd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI-18, acceptance rate 20%, 3470 submissions)
  22. Yao Zhang, He Wang, Jingxian Huang, Dengji Zhao: Simulations vs. Human Playing in Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma. (Reviews, Presentation, Poster) In the Proceedings of The 21st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA-18, acceptance rate 26%)
  23. Bin Li, Dong Hao, Dengji Zhao, Tao Zhou: Mechanism Design in Social Networks. (Reviews, Presentation) In the Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-17, acceptance rate 25%, 2590 submissions)
  24. Dengji Zhao, Sarvapali Ramchurn, Nick Jennings: Fault Tolerant Mechanism Design for General Task Allocation. (Reviews, Presentation, Poster) In the Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-16, acceptance rate 24%, 550 submissions)
  25. Shaofei Chen, Tim Baarslag, Dengji Zhao, Jing Chen, Lincheng Shen: A Polynomial Time Optimal Algorithm for Robot-Human Search under Uncertainty. (Reviews, Presentation) In the Proceedings of the 25th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-16, acceptance rate 25%, 2294 submissions)
  26. Dengji Zhao, Sarvapali Ramchurn, Enrico Gerding, Nick Jennings: Balanced Trade Reduction for Dual-Role Exchange Markets. (Reviews, Presentation) In the Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15, acceptance rate 26%, 1991 submissions)
  27. Dengji Zhao, Dongmo Zhang, Enrico Gerding, Yuko Sakurai, Makoto Yokoo: Incentives in Ridesharing with Deficit Control. (Reviews, Presentation, Poster) In the Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-14, acceptance rate 24%, 709 submissions)
  28. Dengji Zhao, Siqi Luo, Taiki Todo, Makoto Yokoo: False-name-proof Combinatorial Auction Design via Single- minded Decomposition. (Reviews, Presentation) In the Proceedings of the 21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-14, acceptance rate 28%, 611 submissions)
  29. Enrico Gerding, Sebastian Stein, Valentin Robu, Dengji Zhao, Nick Jennings: Two-Sided Online Markets for Electric Vehicle Charging. (Reviews, Presentation) In the Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-13, acceptance rate 23%, 612 submissions)
  30. Dengji Zhao: Mechanism Design for Dynamic Double Auctions. (Presentation, Defence Report) PhD Thesis, University of Western Sydney and University of Toulouse, Australia and France (2012).
  31. Dengji Zhao, Dongmo Zhang and Laurent Perrussel: Multi-unit Double Auction under Group Buying. (Reviews, Presentation) In the Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2012, acceptance rate 28%, 563 submissions).
  32. Dengji Zhao, Dongmo Zhang and Laurent Perrussel: Mechanism Design for Double Auctions with Temporal Constraints. (Reviews, Presentation, Video, Poster) In the Proceedings of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11, acceptance rate 17%, 1325 submissions).
  33. Dengji Zhao: Mechanism Design for Dynamic Environments: Online Double Auctions. (Reviews) In the Proceedings of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11) (Doctoral Consortium).
  34. Dengji Zhao, Dongmo Zhang and Laurent Perrussel: How to Make Specialists NOT Specialised in TAC Market Design Competition? Behaviour-based Mechanism Design. (Reviews, Presentation) In the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web 2011).
  35. Dengji Zhao, Dongmo Zhang, Md Khan, and Laurent Perrussel: Maximal Matching for Double Auction. (Reviews, Presentation) AI 2010, LNAI 6464, pp. 516--525. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). (The Best Student Paper Award)
  36. Dengji Zhao, Stephan Schiffel, and Michael Thielscher: Decomposition of Multi-Player Games. (Reviews, Presentation) AI 2009 LNAI 5866, pp. 475--484. Springer, Heidelberg (2009) (acceptance rate 38%, 174 submissions).
  37. Dengji Zhao: Decomposition of Multi-Player Games. (Presentation) Master Thesis, TU Dresden, Germany (2009).