Tad Hogg: Research Areas

My research involves designing, empirically evaluating and modeling large human and distributed computational systems by relating aggregate performance to their component behaviors. These systems include groups of people with economic and social interactions, collections of software agents, and machines composed of many nano-scale sensors and computers. This work combines modeling, numerical simulation, human-subject economic experiments and statistical data analysis.

Research areas:

• online communities and their social networks
• economic mechanisms such as for reputation and information aggregation (wisdom of crowds)
• multiagent systems, including
  • techniques, such as zero-knowledge protocols, to protect privacy while establishing trust and reputations
  • economic mechanisms for resource allocation in distributed computation
  • cooperative problem solving
• distributed control of smart matter and microscopic devices based on nano-scale electronics for biomedical applications
• the relation between physics and computation, including
  • analogies with physical phase transitions found in combinatorial search and nanoelectronic circuits
  • quantum computation