I am a lecturer and advisor in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. I spent a few years as a postdoc working with Kevin Leyton-Brown at University of British Columbia. I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University advised by Yiling Chen. Before Harvard, I was an undergraduate student in Computer Science and Mathematics at University of British Columbia.

Teaching

I love teaching! I have taught several courses: Introduction to C Programming (CS 136), Logic and Computation (CS 245 and CPSC 121), and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (CS 486).

Courses taught at the University of Waterloo:

• CS 486/686. (Sep - Dec) Fall 2021


• CS 486/686. (May - Aug) Spring 2021
• CS 486/686. (Jan - Apr) Winter 2021
• CS 486/686. (Sep - Dec) Fall 2020


• CS 486/686. (May - Aug) Spring 2020
• CS 245. (Sep - Dec) Fall 2019


• CS 486/686. (May - Aug) Spring 2019
• CS 136. (Jan - Apr) Winter 2019
• CS 486/686. (Sep - Dec) Fall 2018


• CS 245. (May - Aug) Spring 2018
• CS 136. (Jan - Apr) Winter 2018
• CS 245. (Sep - Dec) Fall 2017

Courses taught at the University of British Columbia:

• CPSC 121. Jan to Apr 2017
• CPSC 121. Sep to Dec 2016
• CPSC 121. Jan to Apr 2017

Research

I enjoy learning and working on education research. As a Ph.D. student and a postdoc, my research is broadly at the intersection of artificial intelligence and game theory. I think about how to design the incentives in a system to get accurate infnormation from strategic participants. My work has tackled a range of problems including designing grading mechanisms and forecasting future events, by using a mix of theoretical and experimental methods.

Publications

• Incentivizing Evaluation via Limited Access to Ground Truth: Peer-Prediction Makes Things Worse
  Xi Alice Gao, James R. Wright, and Kevin Leyton-Brown
  Under review at Artificial Intelligence Journal.
  In 2nd Workshop on Algorithmic Game Theory and Data Science at EC 2016.
  
  
• Trick or treat: putting peer prediction to the test

  Xi Alice Gao, Andrew Mao, Yiling Chen, Ryan Prescott Adams
  EC '14 Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Economics and computation, 2014
  
  
• Market Manipulation with Outside Incentives
  Yiling Chen, Xi Alice Gao, Rick Goldstein, and Ian A. Kash
  Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2014, DOI: 10.1007/s10458-014-9249-1..
  (Supersedes the AAAI 2011 paper below.)
  
  
• What you jointly know determines how you act: strategic interactions in prediction markets

  Xi Alice Gao, Jie Zhang, Yiling Chen
  EC '13 Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce, 2013
  
  
• Quality Expectation-Variance Tradeoffs in Crowdsourcing Contests
  Xi Alice Gao, Yoram Bachrach, Peter Key, and Thore Graepel.
  In Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2012), Toronto, ON, Canada, 2012.
  
  
• Adaptive Polling for Information Aggregation
  Thomas Pfeiffer, Xi Alice Gao, Andrew Mao, Yiling Chen, and David G. Rand.
  In Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2012), Toronto, ON, Canada, 2012.
  
  
• Market Manipulation with Outside Incentives
  Yiling Chen, Xi Alice Gao, Rick Goldstein, and Ian A. Kash.
  In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2011), San Francisco, CA, 2011.
  
  
• An Axiomatic Characterization of Continuous-Outcome Market Makers
  Xi Alice Gao and Yiling Chen.
  In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE 2010), Stanford, CA, 2010.
  
  
• Learning Game Representations from Data Using Rationality Constraints
  Xi Alice Gao and Avi Pfeffer.
  In Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2010), Catalina Island, CA, 2010.
  
  
• Betting on the Real Line
  Xi Alice Gao, Yiling Chen, and David M. Pennock.
  In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE 2009), Rome, Italy, 2009.
  

Ph.D. Dissertation

Eliciting and Aggregating Truthful and Noisy Information
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, September 2014.

SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award runner up
IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award runner up