Kevin Leyton-Brown
Distinguished University ScholarCanada CIFAR AI Chair, Amii
Professor
Computer Science
University of British Columbia
2366 Main Mall, Room X565
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
604-822-1453 (phone)
604-822-5485 (fax)
Notable Recent News
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada I was elected as a member of the 2023 cohort.
- ACM SIG-KDD Research Track Test of Time Award For the 2013 paper Auto-WEKA: Combined Selection and Hyperparameter Optimization of Classification Algorithms, with Chris Thornton, Frank Hutter, Holger Hoos.
- AAAI Conference Committee Chair I chair the committee that appoints general and program chairs for the AAAI conference and advises them in the operation of the conference.
Academic Affiliations I'm Director of the UBC ICICS Center for AI Decision-making and Action (CAIDA), Director of the UBC Science Research Cluster on AI Methods for Scientific Impact (AIM-SI), and an Associate Member of the Vancouver School of Economics. I'm a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a
Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI).
Industry Affiliations I currently advise
AI21 Labs,
Auctionomics,
and
OneChronos. I have co-founded two
companies:
Kudu.ug and
Meta-Algorithmic Technologies. In the past, I
have consulted for Cryptic Labs,
Qudos,
Zynga,
Trading Dynamics,
Ariba,
Cariocas, and was scientific advisor to Vancouver-based
Zite until it was
acquired by CNN in 2011.
Past Academic Affiliations
In 2022 I was a
long-term visitor
at the Simons
Institute program on
Learning and Games at
UC Berkeley.
In 2018 I was a visiting researcher at
Microsoft Research New York City and a visiting faculty member at
both Technion IIT
and Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In 2016 I was a
long-term visitor
at the Simons
Institute program on
Algorithms and Uncertainty at
UC Berkeley, a visiting researcher at
Microsoft Research New England, and a visiting faculty member at
Harvard University. In 2015 I was a
long-term
visitor at the Simons
Institute program on
Economics and Computation at UC Berkeley. On
my 2010–11 sabbatical I visited
Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda,
and Hebrew University
of Jerusalem's
Institute for Advanced Studies. I'm a former member of Yoav
Shoham's Multiagent Group
in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of
Stanford University's
Department of Computer Science.
Editorial I am an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on
Economics and Computation (ACM-TEAC), and
AI Access,
and was previously an associate editor of the
Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ)
and the Journal of AI Research (JAIR). I was General Chair for ACM-EC in 2023, Program Chair for AAAI
in 2021, and Program Chair for ACM-EC in 2012. I was Chair of the ACM
Special Interest Group on Electronic
Commerce (SIG-Ecom) from 2015–2019 and a member of the Board of
Directors of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents
and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) from 2014–2020. I have been Tutorial Chair for IJCAI,
AAAI
and ACM-EC. I've guest edited for
Games and Economic Behavior (GEB),
ACM-TEAC, and
AI Magazine. I
have been an area chair for AAAI and IJCAI,
and have held senior program committee and program committee roles at a
wide range of conferences across AI, machine learning, algorithmic game
theory, and beyond.
Books I coauthored
Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic,
Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations, and
Essentials of Game Theory: A
Concise, Multidisciplinary Introduction,
both
with Yoav
Shoham.
Prospective Graduate Students For students not enrolled at UBC: please
do not contact me directly; instead,
apply to my department and indicate an interest in working with me.
You can learn about my research area from
my free online class. I am likely to take on new PhD students from outside UBC
only when I am already familiar with their publications from conferences
that I attend.
I am more likely to take on other students for an MSc with the possibility of
continuing to a PhD. For students who are already at UBC,
please take my grad class and drop by
GT-DT if you're
interested in the intersection between artificial intelligence, heuristic optimization, and strategic behavior.
Current Graduate Students My current grad students are
Chris Cameron,
Greg d'Eon,
Devon Graham,
Taylor Lundy,
Narun Raman,
Hedayat Zarkoob.
Past Graduate Students and Postdocs My past PhD students are Neil Newman (2024), Jason Hartford (2021), James Wright (2016), David Thompson (2015), Lin Xu (2014), Baharak Rastegari (2013), Albert Xin Jiang (2011), Frank Hutter (2009). My past MSc students are Yingsai Dong (2015), Steve Ramage (2015), Chris Thornton (2013), Chris Nell (2011), Ashiqur KhudaBukhsk (2009), Erik Zawadzki (2008), Asher Lipson (2005). My past postdocs are Lars Kotthoff (2017), Alice Gao (2017), Frank Hutter (2013).