CV (incl. publication list)
Course: Algo and Math Foundations of Game Theory & Econ
Academic Resources
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CHEUNG, Yun Kuen (Marco)
Senior Lecturer, School of Computing, The Australian National University
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Email: y#nk#en.che#ng@an#.ed#.a# (replace # by an appropriate alphabet)
Office Address:
Hanna Neumann Building (145) Office 3.19
The Australian National University
Acton, ACT 2601
Australia
Office Phone: +61 2 6125 7882
Yun Kuen Cheung (Marco) is a Senior Lecturer in ANU School of Computing. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University (NYU).
He has held postdoctoral/research fellow positions in University of Vienna, Max-Planck-Institut (MPI) für Informatik and Singapore University of Technology and Design. Before joining ANU, he was a Lecturer of Computer Science in Royal Holloway University of London.
He received BSc in Mathematics & Physics and MPhil in Mathematics, both from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
I am grateful to have Richard Cole as my PhD advisor,
and Monika Henzinger and Kurt Mehlhorn as my postdoc mentors.
My MPhil-PhD-PhD grand2-advisor is Donald Knuth. [1] My PhD-PhD and postdoc-PhD grand-advisors are Turing Awardees John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan respectively. [2,3]
My MPhil-PhD and MPhil-postdoc grand-advisors are Robert Sedgewick and Philippe Flajolet respectively, two giants in analytic combinatorics and algorithms; their book Analytic Combinatorics is one of my all-time favorites. [1]
My Erdös number is 3. [4]
[1] My MPhil advisor is Mordecai Golin, whose PhD advisor is Robert Sedgewick and postdoc mentor is Philippe Flajolet. Robert Sedgewick's PhD advisor is Donald Knuth.
[2] My PhD advisor is Richard Cole, whose PhD advisor is John Hopcroft.
[3] One of my postdoc mentors is Monika Henzinger, whose PhD advisor is Robert Tarjan.
[4] I published papers with Philippe Flajolet and Kurt Mehlhorn, both of them have Erdös number 2. I am not aware of any path that reduces my Erdös number to 2.
"Cheung" and "Yun Kuen" are the English transliterations of my surname 張 and given name 潤權. While the characters are generically recognized as Chinese, it is worth noting that Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau use Traditional Chinese characters, which are different from the Simplified Chinese characters used in Singapore, Malaysia and China.
It is a common practice of Hongkongers to adopt an unofficial western name, and mine is "Marco".
Shortly after joining ANU, I had the opportunity to teach a summer course "Algorithmic Game Theory and Economics" at the AMSI Summer School 2024. In this course, I emphasized both the computational aspects and the mathematical rigor in economics. It was very well received, with many interactions with the students — perhaps a bit too much, as I sometimes ought to usher them out of my office during the already-longly-extended office hours...
After the course, I finally got some time to handle my new academic homepage. I learnt about Amazon AWS from my Royal Holloway colleague DongGyun Han, and found that hosting a website under my custom domain is easy. So, why not register a domain computational and mathematical economics for my new homepage? academy is my most favorite tld provided by AWS, which carries the meaning of "a place of scholars promoting high academic standards".
I am a die-hard fan of Liverpool FC. I play table-tennis and pickleball with ANU colleagues.
I like watching (not-so-mainstream) movies. One of my few fond memories of Royal Holloway is the campus cats. I play intellectual short games — I am the de facto leader in Google's rankings for two categories of the award-winning game "Chip Chain". [1]
[1] There are 3 (resp. 1) players ranked higher than me in "Short Game" (resp. "Timed Game"), but there is strong evidence suggesting that they cracked the scoreboard.
Research Interests
My general research interests lie in Algorithm Design & Analysis, General Equilibrium Theory and Game Theory. More specifically, I am focusing on Computational Economics, Algorithmic Game Theory and Learning-in-Games. Over the past three decades, the Internet has numerous economic systems characterized by profound interactions between human and algorithms. These systems include recommender systems, gig economies, prediction/financial/betting markets, ad auctions and network sharing. Our objective is to cultivate a comprehensive understanding of these complex systems in terms of stability, efficiency, fairness or diversity, by leveraging techniques from Optimization, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Control Theory.
I also maintain a keen interest in Combinatorics and Graph Theory & Algorithms, particularly in problems related to graph sparsification, graph partitioning, graph clustering, random walk and random spanning tree. I had worked on analytic combinatorics during my MPhil.
PhD Opportunities
Prof. Lexing Xie and I have been awarded an ARC Discovery Project grant titled "Interactions of Human and Machine Intelligence in Modern Economic Systems". We are seeking motivated students with a strong background in computing or mathematics to pursue PhD and conduct exciting research about online economic systems.
I also have PhD scholarships to support fundamental research in Algorithm Design & Analysis, and Graph Theory & Algorithms.
About Machine Learning (ML): My research has overlaps with theoretical ML, a field that demands strong mathematical maturity.
To engage in meaningful research in this area, it is essential to have good understanding of undergraduate linear algebra, multivariable calculus, probability theory and statistics.
If you lack the required mathematical knowledge, please do not approach me for PhD or honours project opportunities in ML research.
News (since July 2023)
- (2025-01-01) Promoted to Senior Lecturer.
- (2024-12-11) ANU has won the highest-placed Australian University in the Simon Marais Mathematics Competition.
- (2024-06-27) Will serve as a senior program committee for the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2025, and as a program committee for the Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE) 2024.
- (2024-05-03) Paper with Haiqing Zhu, Alexander Soen and Lexing Xie, "Online Learning in Betting Markets: Profit versus Prediction", is accepted to the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024. arxiv version available here.
- (2024-03-23) Lecture 3 "Existence of Nash Equilibrium" in Algorithmic and Mathematical Foundations of Game Theory and Economics is available. Appendix B presents construction of a game with no Nash equilibrium, in which there are infinitely many players but each player has only two actions.
- (2024-03-21) Give a talk titled "Machine Learning in Games and Economic Systems" in ANU AI, ML + Friends Seminars. I have put more emphasis on the connections between zero-sum games, minimax optimization and adversarial learning. See Academic Resources for details.
- (2024-02-02) Last day of AMSI Summer School 2024. Course lecture notes will be gradually made available here.
- (2024-01-26) Heartbreaking to know Jürgen Klopp will leave Liverpool FC at the end of this season. But I fully understand that he needs a break badly. It is too demanding for him to sustain such a high intensity of energy for such a long time. When he arrived at Anfield in 2015, he said "It's not so important what people think when you come in. It's much more important what people think when you leave." After eight years, this resonates deeply. Thanks, the normal one. You'll never walk alone.
- (2024-01-08) First day of AMSI Summer School 2024.
- (2023-11-07) Start serving in the ANU Library Advisory Committee, as the representative of the College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics.
- (2023-10-30) Lexing Xie and I are awarded a Discovery Project grant titled "Interactions of Human and Machine Intelligence in Modern Economic Systems".
- (2023-09-08) Complete my service as program committee of the Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE) 2023.
- (2023-07-17) Arrive at Australia and ANU. Wish myself a rejuvenating academic and research journey ahead.
- (2023-05-01) Complete my service as program committee of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC) 2023.
- (2023-03-09) Give a talk titled "An Optimization Landscape of Dynamics in Economics" in University of Oxford Algorithms and Complexity Theory Seminars.
- (2023-01-25) Paper with Haiqing Zhu and Lexing Xie, "Stability and Efficiency of Personalised Cultural Markets", is accepted to the Web Conference (WWW) 2023. This is the first paper of Haiqing.
- (2023-01-04) Complete my service as program committee of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2023.
- (2022-09-01) Fulfill my dream of watching a Liverpool FC game at the Kop End of Anfield Stadium. Fabio Carvalho scored the winning goal in the 90+8th minute! You'll never walk alone.
- (2022-06-16) Give a talk titled "Instability and Chaos of Learning-in-Games via Volume Analysis" in London School of Economics (LSE) Seminar on Combinatorics, Games and Optimization.
- (2022-05-10) Paper with Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury, Jugal Garg, Naveen Garg, Martin Hoefer and Kurt Mehlhorn, "Fair Division of Indivisible Goods for a Class of Concave Valuations", is published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).
- (2022-01-24) Paper with Georgios Piliouras and Yixin Tao, "The Evolution of Uncertainty of Learning in Games", is accepted to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022.