About Me
I am a 4th year Ph.D. student in Logic, Computation, & Methodology at Carnegie Mellon University’s philosophy department. My work takes inspiration from formal epistemology to solve problems within various domains of theoretical computer science, e.g. distributed consensus, game theory, and cryptography.
Ongoing Projects
Topological Semantics for Common Inductive Knowledge
This project provides a novel account of how a witness can generate common inductive knowledge. Following Kelly in The Logic of Reliable Inquiry, we cash out inductive knowability as limit verifiability and represent the information each agent learns with topological bases over possible worlds. After defining common inductive knowledge, we show that our semantics nicely characterizes the solutions to an 'inductive' version of the coordinated attack problem. Draft.
Eliciting Causal Bayesian Networks with Scoring Rules
Strictly proper scoring rules are often used as an incentive compatible mechanism to elicit an agent's beliefs about the distribution of a random variable. What incentive compatible mechanisms then, if any, are available to elicit an agent's beliefs about the causal structure governing a set of random variables? This projects presents three separate mechanisms each of which, under certain identifiability and rationality assumptions, attain incentive compatibility. Presentation.
Resource Bounded Randomness for Instantiating Cryptographic Security
Tadaki & Doi 2015 show that Martin-Löf (ML) random sequences can serve to safely instantiate any signature scheme proven secure in the random oracle model. Unfortunately, ML random sequences are not computable. Till now, it is an open conjecture whether all signature schemes proven secure in the random oracle model can be safely instantiated by a computable hash function. This project uses resource bounded randomness to prove this conjecture. Presentation.
Past Projects
Prediction Markets: A Mechanism for Information Aggregation
This project was my undergraduate thesis. It is largely expository, covering a wide array of topics such as probability measure aggregation, Aumann's agreement theorem, and Hanson's logarthmic market scoring rule (LMSR). Original contributions include an analysis of how rationally inattentive myopic agents will interact with the LMSR as well as an interesting formal connection between automated market makers and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Thesis.
Contact
Email: snamachi@andrew.cmu.edu