Multiagent systems is a key area within artificial intelligence (AI) that explores the behavior of interacting rational agents where the decisions of one agent impact others. Rooted in economic game theory, multiagent systems takes the idea of individual incentives from economic game theory and applies it to distributed computation and decentralized mechanisms. It examines not only how certain overall economic or computational goals can be accomplished, but also why individual participants will choose to cooperate with reaching that goal. While multiagent systems is grounded in rigorous mathematical theory, current pedagogical approaches often lack opportunities for students to connect abstract theory with real-world human dynamics. This disconnect is particularly pressing as AI increasingly operates in sociotechnical environments, where understanding human behavior and interaction is critical. This paper presents the first exploration of using large participation activities to facilitate experiential learning to bridge this gap. We report on a day-long resource allocation scenario involving up to 43 participants, designed to simulate multiagent interactions under pressure and with meaningful stakes, where learners can apply their theoretical knowledge to analyze and solve emerging problems. We propose ``megagames'' as a powerful pedagogical tool not only for multiagent systems, but also for other domains as well.

Engaging undergraduate students in the study of ethics and technology is an important and difficult task for both computer science programs and individual instructors. Narratives, especially science fiction, have become a popular way to entice students to deeply engage with ethics topics. We detail experiences across six different institutions of implementing full-semester, part-semester, and single-lecture lessons from the recently-published book Computing and Technology Ethics: Engaging through Science Fiction. We provide an overview of both the book and related instructor materials; explaining how they can be used to effectively teach topics in ethics to undergraduate students in computing and technology development courses. We close by reflecting on how the book was received by students, and general suggestions for implementing ethics education across a range of institutional contexts.

Nowadays, services and applications are becoming more latency-sensitive and resource-hungry. Due to their high computational complexity, they can not always be processed locally in user equipment, and have to be offloaded to a distant powerful server. Instead of resorting to remote Cloud servers with high latency and traffic bottlenecks, service providers could map their users to Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) servers that can run computation-intensive tasks nearby. This mapping of users to MEC distributed servers is known as the Edge User Allocation (EUA) problem, and has been widely studied in the literature from the perspective of service providers. However, users in previous works can only be allocated to a server if they are in its coverage. In reality, it may be optimal to allocate a user to a distant server (e.g., two hops away from the user) if the latency threshold and system cost are both respected. This work presents the first attempt to tackle the multi-hop aware EUA problem. We consider the static EUA problem where users have a simultaneous-batch arrival pattern, and detail the added complexity compared to the original EUA setting. Afterwards, we propose a game theory-based distributed approach for allocating users to edge servers. We finally conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of our approach against other baseline approaches. The results illustrate the potential benefits of allowing multi-hop allocations in providing better overall system cost to service providers.

We examine the problem of assigning plots of land to prospective buyers who prefer living next to their friends. In this setting, each agent's utility depends on the plot she receives and the identities of the agents who receive the adjacent plots. We are interested in mechanisms without money that guarantee truthful reporting of both land values and friendships, as well as Pareto optimality and computational efficiency. We explore several modifications of the Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD) mechanism, and identify one that performs well according to these criteria, We also study the expected social welfare of the assignments produced by our mechanisms when agents' values for the land plots are binary; it turns out that we can achieve good approximations to the optimal social welfare, but only if the agents value the friendships highly.

Influence maximization is a widely used model for information dissemination in social networks. Recent work has employed such interventions across a wide range of social problems, spanning public health, substance abuse, and international development (to name a few examples). A critical but understudied question is whether the benefits of such interventions are fairly distributed across different groups in the population; e.g., avoiding discrimination with respect to sensitive attributes such as race or gender. Drawing on legal and game-theoretic concepts, we introduce formal definitions of fairness in influence maximization. We provide an algorithmic framework to find solutions which satisfy fairness constraints, and in the process improve the state of the art for general multi-objective submodular maximization problems. Experimental results on real data from an HIV prevention intervention for homeless youth show that standard influence maximization techniques oftentimes neglect smaller groups which contribute less to overall utility, resulting in a disparity which our proposed algorithms substantially reduce.

Wildland fires (or wildfires) occur on all continents except for Antarctica. These fires threaten communities, change ecosystems, destroy vast quantities of natural resources and the cost estimates of the damage done annually is in the billions of dollars. Controlling wildland fires is resource-intensive and there are numerous examples where the resource demand has outstripped resource availability. Trends in changing climates, fire occurrence and the expansion of the wildland-urban interface all point to increased resource shortages in the future. One approach for coping with these shortages has been the sharing of resources across different wildland-fire agencies. This introduces new issues as agencies have to balance their own needs and risk-management with their desire to help fellow agencies in need. Using ideas from the field of multiagent systems, we conduct the first analysis of strategic issues arising in resource-sharing for wildland-fire control. We also argue that the wildland-fire domain has numerous features that make it attractive to researchers in artificial intelligence and computational sustainability.