Mechanism design provides a formalism within which to understand the possible and the impossible when designing multi-agent systems with private information and rational agents. In introducing computational considerations, we have gained some understanding of how to reconcile new tensions that arise. Today, we see a thirst for practical, engineered incentive mechanisms to deploy across the myriad of multi-user systems enabled by the Internet. I will highlight some of the new challenges that this presents, in moving from isolated events to continual processes, from simple models to complex, multi-faceted agent models, and in enabling new kinds of computational and coordination processes.

David C. Parkes is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He was the recipient of the NSF Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Thouron Scholarship, the Harvard University Roslyn Abramson Award for Teaching and named as one of Harvard Class of 2010 Favorite Professors. Parkes received his Ph.D.  degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, and an M.Eng. (First class) in Engineering and Computing Science from Oxford University in 1995. At Harvard, Parkes founded the Economics and Computer Science research group and teaches classes in artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, multi-agent systems, and topics at the intersection between computer science and economics. Parkes has served as Program Chair of ACM EC'07 and AAMAS'08 and General Chair of ACM EC'10, served on the editorial board of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and currently serves as Editor of Games and Economic Behavior and on the boards of Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems and INFORMS Journal of Computing. His research interests include computational mechanism design, electronic commerce, stochastic optimization, preference elicitation, market design, bounded rationality, computational social choice, networks and incentives, multi-agent systems, crowd-sourcing and social computing. 

See also http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~parkes/