Saddle Point
Back to the cover

Part I · Foundations

  1. 0 Mathematical Foundations
  2. 1 Observation, Beliefs, and Decision

Part II · Engines

  1. 2 Competing for Allocation: The Blotto Game
  2. 3 Bargaining, Commitment, and Repeated Cooperation
  3. 4 Signals, Disclosure, and Persuasion
  4. 5 Different Models of One Game
  5. 6 Leadership and Rules: Inspection
  6. 7 Decisions in Time
  7. 8 Many Agents
  8. 9 Networks, Dependence, and Resilience
  9. 10 Aggregating Information

Part III · Systems

  1. 11 Architecture of Decision Support
  2. 12 Simulation and Wargaming with AI Agents

Part IV · Limits

  1. 13 Where the Mathematics Stops
Milind Tambe, 2017

Chapter 11 · Architecture of Decision Support

Milind Tambe

living

Photograph: Milind tambe, Milind Tambe (12 April 2017), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Shown toned. File and licence

The problem on the desk

How could airport police allocate scarce patrol resources without creating predictable gaps? Tambe and his co-authors modelled scheduling as a Bayesian Stackelberg game, balancing targets, costs and uncertainty about adversary types.1

A life in moments

  1. 1991

    Carnegie Mellon University · Pittsburgh

    Completed his doctorate.2

  2. 2007-08

    Los Angeles International Airport; University of Southern California · Los Angeles

    ARMOR began a trial deployment for randomised roadway checkpoints.3

  3. 2007-11

    Los Angeles International Airport · Los Angeles

    ARMOR began generating randomised canine-patrol schedules.3

  4. 2009

    US Federal Air Marshal Service

    His group’s security-game research entered air-marshal scheduling.4

  5. 2011

    US Coast Guard

    Security-game patrol systems began deployment in ports.4

  6. 2019

    Harvard University · Cambridge, Massachusetts

    Joined Harvard as Gordon McKay Professor and director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society.5

Every line rests on a dated source (numbered below) unless it carries a mark: R for an inference, S for a story as told.

In their own words

limited resources imply that it is typically impossible to provide full security coverage at all times.

Deployed ARMOR Protection: The Application of a Game Theoretic Model for Security at the Los Angeles International Airport, 20087

A story

A schedule people could change

The deployed system let officers adjust schedules for local constraints. It also warned when repeated overrides undermined the intended randomisation.6

Around Tambe

  • built on the work John C. Harsanyi The ARMOR paper discusses the Harsanyi transformation when comparing solution methods.8

Recorded as advisors Allen Newell, Paul Simon Rosenbloom Recorded as students Fei Fang, Manish Jain, James Pita Mathematics Genealogy Project record

The genealogy lists only what the database records; a missing name is not a missing teacher.

The card in the book

Computer scientist; doctorate from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. At the University of Southern California, where he held the Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professorship in Engineering and was founding co-director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society, his group built deployed scheduling systems on Stackelberg security games: ARMOR began randomising checkpoints and canine patrols at Los Angeles International Airport in 2007, and later systems were used by the US Coast Guard and the Federal Air Marshal Service, and against wildlife poaching. He is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, where he directs the Center for Research on Computation and Society, and director for “AI for Social Good” at Google. He is a fellow of AAAI and ACM and received the IJCAI John McCarthy Award.

Main works “Deployed ARMOR protection”, with J. Pita et al. (2008); “Playing games for security”, with P. Paruchuri et al. (2008); Security and Game Theory: Algorithms, Deployed Systems, Lessons Learned (2012).

To read further

Sources (8)
  1. Deployed ARMOR Protection: The Application of a Game Theoretic Model for Security at the Los Angeles International Airport, James Pita, Manish Jain, Janusz Marecki, Fernando Ordóñez, Christopher Portway, Milind Tambe, Craig Western, Praveen Paruchuri and Sarit Kraus, 2008; PDF p. 1, abstract and introduction
  2. Mathematics Genealogy Project: Milind Tambe, Mathematics Genealogy Project; Degree and dissertation
  3. Deployed ARMOR Protection: The Application of a Game Theoretic Model for Security at the Los Angeles International Airport, James Pita, Manish Jain, Janusz Marecki, Fernando Ordóñez, Christopher Portway, Milind Tambe, Craig Western, Praveen Paruchuri and Sarit Kraus, 2008; PDF p. 2, end of §1
  4. Milind Tambe: professional biography, Milind Tambe; Harvard University; Public-safety deployment history
  5. Milind Tambe joins Harvard University (appointment announcement; abbreviated title), Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 2019; 6 August 2019; opening appointment paragraphs
  6. Deployed ARMOR Protection: The Application of a Game Theoretic Model for Security at the Los Angeles International Airport, James Pita, Manish Jain, Janusz Marecki, Fernando Ordóñez, Christopher Portway, Milind Tambe, Craig Western, Praveen Paruchuri and Sarit Kraus, 2008; PDF pp. 1–2, mixed-initiative interface
  7. Deployed ARMOR Protection: The Application of a Game Theoretic Model for Security at the Los Angeles International Airport, James Pita, Manish Jain, Janusz Marecki, Fernando Ordóñez, Christopher Portway, Milind Tambe, Craig Western, Praveen Paruchuri and Sarit Kraus, 2008; PDF p. 1, §1; co-authored passage, excerpt
  8. Deployed ARMOR Protection: The Application of a Game Theoretic Model for Security at the Los Angeles International Airport, James Pita, Manish Jain, Janusz Marecki, Fernando Ordóñez, Christopher Portway, Milind Tambe, Craig Western, Praveen Paruchuri and Sarit Kraus, 2008; PDF p. 2, §2

The facts on this page were gathered for the site from the sources listed, each checked against its locator; the book's card is reproduced unchanged.