Seminar: Efficiency and Resilience

Speaker:

Prof. Moshe Y. Vardi
Rice University
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~vardi

In both computer science and economics, efficiency is a cherished
property. In computer science, the field of algorithms is almost
solely focused on their efficiency. In economics, the main advantage
of the free market is that it promises “economic efficiency”. A
major lesson from COVID-19 is that both fields have over-emphasized
efficiency and under-emphasized resilience. I argue that resilience
is a more important property than efficiency and discuss how the two
fields can broaden their focus to make resilience a primary consideration.
I will include a technical example, showing how we can shift
the focus in formal methods from efficiency to resilience.