In this thesis, we study both theoretical and practical aspects of decision making, with a focus on reinforcement learning based methods. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a form of semi-supervised learning in which the agent ...

1 Introduction In this doctoral thesis, we address several representative problems that arise in the context of learning from multiple heterogeneous agents. These problems are relevant to many modern applications such as ...

Over the past decade, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to a surge of interest to understand and predict aggregate behavior of large number of people or agents, particularly when they are connected through an ...

With the ever-increasing trend in the number of social interactions getting intermediated by technology (the world wide web) as the backdrop, this thesis focuses on the design of mechanisms for online communities (crowds) ...

This work is motivated by several modern applications involving social networks, crowds, and markets. Our work focuses on the theme of designing effective incentive strategies for these applications. Viral marketing is ...