- Series
- ACO Seminar
- Time
- Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - 4:30pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Klaus 2443
- Speaker
- Balaji Prabhakar – Stanford University
- Organizer
- Robin Thomas
Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?
Why does glue not stick to the inside of the bottle?
Why is lemonade made with artificial flavor but dishwashing liquid made with
real lemons?
How can I avoid traffic jams and be paid for it?
While the first three are some of life's enduring questions, the fourth
is the subject of a traffic decongestion research project at Stanford
University. In this talk, I will briefly describe this project and, more
generally, discuss incentive mechanisms for Societal Networks---
networks which are vital for a society's functioning; for example,
transportation, energy, healthcare and waste management. I will
talk about incentive mechanisms and experiments for reducing
road congestion, pollution and energy use, and for improving
"wellness" and good driving habits. Some salient themes are:
using low-cost sensing technology to make societal networks much
more efficient, using price as a signal to co-ordinate individual
behavior, and intelligently "throwing money at problems".