University of Southern California
Powell Hall of Engineering 516
3737 Watt Way
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781
Education:
A.B. (2005) degree in Economics from Harvard University.
Research areas of interest:
My research interests are in interdisciplinary applications of Multi-Agent techniques with a focus on immediately addressing real problems by creating impactful solutions. Thus far, my work has been in the security and health policy domains where I have applied game-theoretic and agent-based simulation methods.
Current projects
Electronic Prescription System Adoption
E-prescription systems allow doctors to prescribe medication to patients directly to the pharmacies, allowing for automated checking of conflicting medication, easier operations for doctors and pharmacies, and other improvements in the quality of care.
Existing work focuses on either doctors or pharmacies in examining reasons for low adoption rates of e-prescription systems. We use agent-based simulations to model the interactions between vested parties to determine optimal policy interventions to encourage universal adoption.
Network Interdiction
Using game-theoretic principles, we examine a new class of network interdiction games with the goal of creating optimal interdiction policies for security forces attempting to stop attackers from reaching specific target nodes in a graph. Departing from prior work, we examine games with target preferences, uncertainty of attacker types, and non-zero-sum games.
Federal Air Marshal Service (IRIS)
An extension of the ARMOR project done for LAX, we apply the same principles of intelligent randomization to the assignment of Federal Air Marshals to flights. Research challenges are primarily focused around the complex scheduling constraints of the transportation network and much larger scale of the problem.
Honors
Best Paper Award, AAMAS-09, Industry Track, May 2009. Best Student Poster Award, Third Annual Department of Homeland Security University Summit, March 2009.
Publications
Refereed Major Conference Publications
Jason Tsai, Shyamsunder Rathi, Christ Kiekintveld, Fernando Ordonez, and Milind Tambe. IRIS - A Tool for Strategic Security Allocation in Transportation Networks. In Proceedings of the Industry Track of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, May 2009. (Best Paper Award, Industry track)
Chris Kiekintveld, Manish Jain, Jason Tsai, James Pita, Milind Tambe, and Fernando Ordonez. Computing Optimal Randomized Resource Allocations for Massive Security Games. In Proceedings of the Industry Track of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, May 2009.
Other Refereed Publications
(to appear)
Jason Tsai, Zhengyu Yin, Jun-Young Kwak, David Kempe, Christopher Kiekintveld, Milind Tambe. Strategic Security Placement in Network Domains with Applications to Transit Security. In IJCAI 2009 Workshop on Quantitative Risk Analysis for Security Applications, July 2009.
