Benjamin Ford, Biplav Srivastava, Milind Tambe, University of Southern California, USA, IBM Research, India

It is common knowledge that the pollution of India's rivers is a major environmental concern. For example, the Ganga is ranked the fifth dirtiest river in the world. Generated from various sources such as untreated sewage and industrial effluents, the pollution inflicts serious health conditions on all life that depends on the river. In Kanpur, villagers suffer from conditions including cholera and miscarriages, and livestock yield less milk and, many times, die...

In the early 2000s, USC Viterbi Computer Science Professor Milind Tambe and a graduate student began working on a game-theory algorithm to optimize interac- tions among robots. They found that randomized interactions resulted in the most effective coordination.

With so many people living in a social media bubble, it’s easy to forget that in all of our communities, most information still spreads without the help of Facebook.

Despite the widespread impact of software today on our lives,

there are a number of areas of computer science research which have had a difficult time in being translated into practical, every day usage. One of those

areas is game theory--the use of computer simulations to predict the behavior of multiple people or entities, and how they will behave together, most famously depicted in that 1980's movie, War Games. Los Angeles startup--ArmorWay (www.armorwaycom)--is trying to take what has mostly been an esoteric computer science research area, and is now looking to...