Research update: Just one more month until I can do actual research

[Ram Rachum]

Hi everyone!

Retrospective on goals for last month

In last month's update I outlined a list of goals. Here's my update on these goals:

1. Prepare two versions of the talk for the dominance hierarchies paper: ✅ Mostly done

   I finished preparing a 50 minute talk about my paper. I haven't prepared a short version yet, because I'd need to know which workshop our paper will be accepted to, if at all, since different workshops have different length requirements. Here's the slide deck.

   I gave the long-form talk at the GOLD lab at Bar-Ilan University and it was well received. Now I'm preparing to give this talk in a few venues, details below.

2. Prepare the poster: 😅 Almost finished

   The poster isn't finished-finished, but it's good enough to show here: https://r.rachum.com/dh-aamas2024-poster

   I still have to change the plots to have a transparent background, fix the arrow orientation in the pictogram, add a QR code, possibly do small changes to the text... Any feedback would be appreciated.

   I hope that AAMAS 2024 will offer a printing service so I could just send them the PDF and have them print it instead of finding my own printer in Auckland.

Workshops

I've mentioned above that I've submitted our dominance hierarchies to some workshops at AAMAS. I won't mention which, because the review process is still underway. If it's accepted, I could do an oral presentation of this paper at the workshop in which it would be accepted, which would be fun for me.

One of the consequences of submitting the paper to these workshops is that now I'm also doing reviews for other people's papers submitted to these workshops. It's a refreshing experience to be in the reviewer's seat for once.

My goals for this month

1. Give the dominance hierarchies talk in different groups.

   Here's my current schedule for giving the dominance hierarchies talk:

   • 2024-03-01, 12:00 New York time: Multi-Agent Learning Seminar (Eugene Vinitsky's reading group). Google Meet link. This is tomorrow!

   • 2024-03-11: FLAIR's reading group, Oxford

   • 2024-03-19, 13:00 New York time: University of Maryland's MARL reading group (managed by Sapta Bandyopadhyay). Google Meet link

   Feel free to attend any of these, except the FLAIR one which is private.

   Some of these venues will record my talk and put it on YouTube. If it'll come out in time, I'll include a link to it in the next update.

   If you know of any venue that could be interested in this talk, please let me know by email!

2. Apply for the CAIF grant.

   I've postponed it for two months, but it's time to roll up my sleeves and apply for the Cooperative AI Foundation's grant program. They're right up my alley, and they even include the M-FOS paper as one of their references. I looked at the application process and it's one of the most structured forms I've ever seen. It'll be a lot of work to fill all of this out, but I hope it'll be worth it.

That's it for now. See you next month!

Ram.