Costas A Courcoubetis
Title
Socio-economic challenges for the Internet of the future
Abstract
The
Internet is founded on a very simple premise: sharing! Shared
communications links are more efficient than dedicated connections that
lie idle much of the time. Hence the rules we use for sharing are
extremely vital for the healthy operation of the Internet ecosystem and
directly affect the value of the network to its users. It becomes a
great paradigm of merging the disciplines of computer science and
economics, and presents a great number of challenges to the Internet
research community. In this talk we will discuss a number of questions
like: what is wrong with today’s Internet sharing technologies? Are
these consistent with economics? More specifically, is TCP sensible from
an economic point of view? Which network sharing technologies justify
end-to-end from an economics perspective? What is required to make p2p a
blessing instead of a curse? Are there bad applications or just
inefficient combinations of sharing technologies and pricing schemes?
Biography
Prof. Costas
A Courcoubetis is heading the Network Economics and Services Group and the
Theory, Economics and Systems Lab at the Athens University of Economics and
Business. He graduated from the National Technical University of Athens,
Greece, in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, and received his PhD from
the University of California, Berkeley. From 1982 until 1990 he was Member
of the Technical Staff in the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at Bell
Laboratories, from 1990 until 1999 he was with the CS Department at the
University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece, where he headed the
Telecommunications and Networks Group at the Institute of Computer Science,
FORTH, and since then he is with the CS Department at the Athens University
of Economics and Business. His research interests include economics of
communication networks, resource allocation and optimization, peer-to-peer
computing, and regulation policy. He has participated in many projects
related to pricing network services and the Internet. He is a co-author with
Richard Weber of “Pricing Communication Networks: Economics, Technology and
Modeling” (Wiley, 2004).
