Christine Konicki

Research

At the start of my Master's at MIT, my research interests originally were in computational social choice and computational complexity. I was focused on solving a variety of subproblems within the larger question of when/how one can efficiently manipulate single-elimination tournaments. My findings and contributions are summarized in my Master's Thesis below. Near the end of my Master's, I became more interested in algorithmic game theory and chose to attend the University of Michigan in pursuit of a PhD so that I could pursue research in this domain.

My research has primarily focused on empirical game theory for extensive-form games, which possess a tree structure similar to single-elimination tournaments and thus require similar complexity considerations. I advanced to candidacy in August 2021 and successfully defended my dissertation proposal in October 2022. My dissertation research will focus on the question of how to incorporate some of the tree structure from extensive-form games into empirical game-theoretic analysis in a variety of areas: strategy exploration, utilizing more refined Nash solution concepts when solving an empirical model, etc.

Publications

1. Exploiting Extensive-Form Structure in Empirical Game-Theoretic Analysis
   Christine Konicki, Mithun Chakraborty, and Michael P. Wellman.
   18th Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2022)
   [paper] [arXiv] [talk]
2. Bribery in Balanced Knockout Tournaments (Extended Abstract)
   Christine Konicki and Virginia Vassilevska Williams
   18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2019)
   [paper] [poster]

Master's Thesis

Topics in Fixing Knockout Tournaments: Bribery, NP-Hardness, and Parameterization
Supervisor: Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Awards

Rackham Conference Travel Grant for WINE 2022

Teaching

University of Michigan

• Graduate Student Instructor. EECS 592: Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Winter 2023.

MIT

• Computer Science Instructor. MIT Women's Technology Program in EECS. Summer 2019.
• Graduate Teaching Assistant. 6.041: Probabilistic Systems and Applied Probability. Spring 2019.
• Graduate Teaching Assistant. 6.009: Fundamentals of Programming. Fall 2018.
• Graduate Teaching Assistant. 6.004: Computation Structures. Fall 2017, Spring 2018.
• Undergraduate Lab Assistant. 6.004: Computation Structures. Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017.
• Undergraduate Lab Assistant. 6.117: Introductory Electrical Engineering Lab. January 2016, 2017.
• Undergraduate Lab Assistant. 6.149: Introduction to Python. January 2016.

Other

• Teaching Fellow. Summer Stem Institute. Summer 2021.

Personal

Crochet

In 2020 during quarantine, I picked up crochet and became an avid yarn crafter. I haven't stopped since then, and my love affair with crochet has grown stronger with time. The union of beauty, technique, and creativity all in this one hobby is unique and brings me joy...as well as a way to decompress from my research duties after a long day. Crocheting blankets for family, friends, and loved ones has been one of the simplest and greatest joys of my life. I specialize primarily in mosaic crochet (pictured above) due to its versatility and endless supply of possibilities. Samples of my work are included below. Enjoy!

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';