Philip Brown, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 719-255-3332
Address: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway, Colorado Springs, CO 80918, USA
Office: ENGR 176
About Dr. Philip Brown
Philip Brown is an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. I received my PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2018 under the supervision of Jason R. Marden in the Center for Control, Dynamical-Systems, and Computation (CCDC) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He is a native of Southern Colorado, and enjoy anything that gets me outdoors on a regular basis: hiking, mountain biking, camping, trail running, and 14er bagging.
Research Interests
I am interested in developing fundamental theory to describe the interaction between technology and society. To study this, I use tools from game theory, optimization, control theory, and various multi-agent systems concepts.
Influencing Behavior in Cyber-Social Systems: I am generally interested in the effect of financial incentives on crowd behavior, particularly with an eye to complex, interconnected systems. I like to tell people that I study “Pricing as an engineering problem,” where we measure the effectiveness of prices by the social outcomes they incentivize rather than the revenue they garner.
Strategic Aspects of Security: One high-level way to understand cyber-security problems is to envision them as a “game” between a defender and an attacker. In this paradigm, the defender attempts to design a security system as a function of some model of the attacker’s strategy. Here, I seek to understand how security vulnerabilities may arise as a result of mis-modeled attackers.
Robust Network Games: Recent years have witnessed great strides in the use of game theory as an overarching framework to inform the design of networked control systems. However, significant questions remain as to the robustness of game-theory-derived control designs. I am interested in identifying and circumventing these known robustness bottlenecks.
Decision Science and Control (DeSCon) Lab
We study the fundamental mathematics of interactive decision-making, applied to a variety of contexts including infrastructure optimization, epidemiology, and the distributed control of multi-agent systems.
Current Projects
- Socially-Networked Autonomy: How Should Machines Interact With Society? This NSF-funded project studies decision design methodologies for autonomous agents that are networked with and interacting among human beings in societal systems. The core question is this: how should a system planner design the routing policies of autonomous vehicles to have the greatest positive impact on overall network traffic congestion, even if human drivers react in a self-interested way to the behavior of the autonomous vehicles? Supported by NSF ECCS 2013779.
- Optimizing the Life-Cycle Impacts of COVID-19 Policy Interventions. This project asks how leaders can make public policy decisions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in a scientific way that is locally appropriate and properly accounts for both near-term and longer-term costs of policy interventions. This project combines rigorous mathematical modeling, innovative approaches to data collection, and input from policymakers, to develop a decision aid framework that weighs the costs and benefits of various policy interventions at a local level and tailors interventions to the locale considering the effects of specific indicators such as urbanization, economic distress, and availability of regional healthcare. Supported by NSF DEB 2032465.
- Value-based Access Control System using Path Security (with PI Dr. Gedare Bloom). This NSA-funded project investigates novel theories, policies, and mechanisms for access control that presumes client credentials are inherently risky. Our approach relies on state-of-the-art advances being made in path-based security for Internet routing. The focus of path-based mechanisms is to enable path selection by senders and path validation back to the sender (source) by intermediate routers and the destination. Our objective is to design, implement, and enforce higher-level access control decisions built upon this baseline to protect digital assets within the (destination) network from malicious source nodes that can pass traditional user authentication mechanisms due to stolen credentials.
Current Graduate Students
- Joshua Seaton 2019-Present
- Pam Russell 2019-Present
- Brandon Collins 2020-Present
- Colton Hill 2021-Present
- Will Wesley 2022-Present
Current Undergraduate Researchers
- Brendan Gould, 2021-Present
- Sonia Karsanbhai, 2021-Present
Past Master’s Thesis Students
- Ryan Young, 2020, First employment: The MITRE Corporation
- Joshua Seaton, 2021. First employment: DeSCon Lab
Past Undergraduate Researchers
- Brandon Collins, 2018-2020. First employment: DeSCon Lab
- Joseph Mazzocco, 2019. First employment: Raytheon
Journal Papers
- Joshua Seaton and Philip N. Brown, “All Stable Equilibria Have Improved Performance Guarantees in Submodular Maximization With Communication-Denied Agents,” in IEEE Letters of the Control Systems Society (L-CSS), 2022. IEEEXplore
- Bryce Ferguson, Philip N. Brown, and Jason R. Marden, “The Effectiveness of Subsidies and Tolls in Congestion Games,” in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2021. arXiv | IEEEXplore
- Bryce Ferguson, Philip N. Brown, and Jason R. Marden, “The Effectiveness of Subsidies and Tolls in Atomic Congestion Games,” in IEEE Letters of the Control Systems Society (L-CSS), 2021. IEEEXplore
- Bryce Ferguson, Philip N. Brown, and Jason R. Marden, “How Information Affects Incentive Design: A Case-Study in Simple Congestion Networks,” (submitted for journal publication), 2020. Preprints available.
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “Can Taxes Improve Congestion on all Networks?” in IEEE Transactions on the Control of Network Systems, 2020. arXiv | IEEEXplore
- Keith Paarporn, Brian Canty, Philip N. Brown, Mahnoosh Alizadeh, Jason R. Marden, ” The Impact of Complex and Informed Adversarial Behavior in Graphical Coordination Games,” in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 2020. arXiv | IEEEXplore
- Philip N. Brown, Holly P. Borowski, and Jason R. Marden, “Security Against Impersonation Attacks in Multiagent Systems,” IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 2018. arXiv | IEEEXplore
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “Optimal Mechanisms for Robust Coordination in Congestion Games,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 63, no. 8, August, 2018 pp. 2437-2448. 2018. PDF | IEEEXplore
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “The Robustness of Marginal-Cost Taxes in Affine Congestion
Games,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 62, no. 8. August, 2017 pp. 3999-4004. PDF - Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “Studies on Robust Social Influence Mechanisms: Incentives for Efficient Network Routing in Uncertain Settings,” IEEE Control Systems Magazine, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 98-115, 2017. PDF
Refereed Conference Proceedings
- Pam Russell and Philip N. Brown, “The Philos Trust Algorithm: Preventing Exploitation of Distributed Trust,” in IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, 2022 (to appear).
- Brendan Gould and Philip N. Brown, “On Partial Adoption of Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communication: When Should Cars Warn Each Other of Hazards?” in 2022 American Control Conference, 2022.
- Christopher Gorog, Pam Russell, Terrance E. Boult, and Philip N. Brown, “Carbon-Neutral Distributed Ledger,” in IEEE PES Transactive Energy Systems Conference, 2022.
- Vjiay Banerjee, Ryan Rabinowitz, Mark Stidd, Rory Lewis, Philip N. Brown, and Gedare BLoom, “The Tragedy of the Miners,” in IEEE 19th Annual Consumer Communications \& Networking Conference (CCNC), 2022. IEEEXplore
- Philip N. Brown, “Providing slowdown information to improve selfish routing,” in EAI GameNets 2021. [Best Paper Award]
- Brandon Collins, Gia Barboza, Lisa Hines, and Philip N. Brown, “Robust Stochastic Stability in Dynamic and Reactive Environments,” in 60th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2021. arXiv | IEEEXplore
- Brandon Collins, Shouhuai Xu, and Philip N. Brown, ” Paying Firms to Share Cyber Threat Intelligence,” in GameSec 2021. Springer
- Ruolin Li, Philip N. Brown, and Roberto Horowitz, “A Highway Toll Lane Framework that Unites Autonomous Vehicles and High-occupancy Vehicles,” in 2021 IEEE International Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), 2021. arXiv | IEEEXplore
- Joshua Seaton and Philip N. Brown, “The Price of Anarchy is Fragile in Single-Selection Coverage Games,” submitted for conference publication, 2021. arXiv
- Philip N. Brown, Brandon Collins, Colton Hill, Gia Barboza, and Lisa Hines, “Individual Altruism Cannot Overcome Congestion Effects in a Global Pandemic Game,” submitted to conference, 2021. arXiv
- Philip N. Brown, “When Altruism Is Worse Than Anarchy in Nonatomic Congestion Games,” in proceedings of 2021 American Control Conference, 2021. arXiv
- Ruolin Li, Philip N. Brown, and Roberto Horowitz, “Employing Altruistic Vehicles at On-Ramps to Improve the Social Traffic Conditions,” in proceedings of 2021 American Control Conference, 2021.
- David Grimsman, Joshua Seaton, Jason R. Marden, and Philip N. Brown, “The Cost of Denied Observation in Multiagent Submodular Optimization,” in proceedings of 59th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2020. arXiv | IEEEXplore
- Brandon Collins and Philip N. Brown, “Exploiting an Adversary’s Intentions in Graphical Coordination Games,” in proceedings of 2020 American Control Conference, 2020. arXiv | IEEEXplore
- Bryce Ferguson, Philip N. Brown, and Jason R. Marden, “Carrots or Sticks? The Effectiveness of Subsidies and Tolls in Congestion Games,” in proceedings of 2020 American Control Conference, 2020. arXiv | IEEEXplore [Best student paper award finalist]
- Philip N. Brown, “Designing for Emergent Security in Heterogeneous Human-Machine Teams,” in Proceedings of 58th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2019. arXiv | IEEEXplore
- Bryce Ferguson, Philip N. Brown, and Jason R. Marden, “Utilizing Information Optimally to Influence Distributed Network Routing,” in proceedings of 58th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2019.
- Philip N. Brown, “A Tragedy of Autonomy: Self-Driving Cars and Urban Congestion Externalities,” in proceedings of 57th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, 2019.
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “On the feasibility of local utility redesign for multiagent optimization,” in Proceedings of European Control Conference, 2019.
- Brian Canty, Philip N. Brown, Mahnoosh Alizadeh, and Jason R. Marden, “The Impact of Informed Adversarial Behavior in Graphical Coordination Games,” in Proceedings of 57th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2018.
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “The Benefit of Perversity in Taxation Mechanisms for Distributed Routing,” in Proceedings of 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2017.
- Jorge I. Poveda, Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, and Andrew R. Teel, “A Class of Distributed Adaptive Pricing Mechanisms for Societal Systems with Limited Information,” in Proceedings of 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2017. [Best student paper award finalist]
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “Fundamental Limits of Locally-Computed Incentives in Network Routing,” in Proceedings of American Control Conference. 2017. PDF
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “Avoiding Perverse Incentives in Affine Congestion Games,” in Proceedings of 55th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. 2016. PDF [Best student paper award finalist]
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “A Study on Price Discrimination for Robust Social Coordination,” in Proceedings of American Control Conference. 2016. PDF
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “Optimal Mechanisms for Robust Coordination in Congestion Games,” in Proceedings of 54th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. 2015. PDF
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “Social Coordination in Unknown Price-Sensitive Populations,” in Proceedings of 52th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. 2013. PDF
Brief Papers
- Philip N. Brown, “An Upper Bound on the Cardinality of a Minimum Feedback Vertex Set for Directed Graphs,” 2020. PDF
- Philip N. Brown, “Incentives for Crypto-Collateralized Digital Assets,” in proceedings of 3rd Annual Decentralized Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, 2019. MDPI
- Philip N. Brown, Holly P. Borowski, and Jason R. Marden, “Projecting Network Games onto Sparse Graphs,” invited paper, Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, 2018. IEEEXplore
- Philip N. Brown, Jason R. Marden, “Studies on mechanisms for robust social influence,” in proceedings of 2017 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA), 2017. IEEEXplore
- “Selfish Self-Driving Cars: An Adventure in Algorithmic Game Theory,” Colorado College, May 2022.
- “When is Altruism Good in Distributed Decision-Making?” Decision and Control Laboratory Seminar, Georgia Institute of Technology, February 2022.
- “Providing slowdown information to improve selfish routing,” EAI GameNets 2021, December 2021. [Best Community-voted presentation award] YouTube
- “Engineers who Make Selfish Machines,” Philosophy in the City lecture series, UCCS Downtown, Colorado Springs, USA, September 2021.
- “On the feasibility of local utility redesign for multiagent optimization,” 6th World Congress of the Game Theory Society, Budapest, Hungary, July 2021.
- “When Altruism Is Worse Than Anarchy in Nonatomic Congestion Games,” 2021 American Control Conference, New Orleans, LA, May 2021. YouTube
- “Engineers who Make Selfish Machines: The Ethics of Socio-Technical Systems,” Ethics Roundtable for the Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative at the UCCS College of Business, April 2021.
- “Altruism Paradoxes and Emergent Security in Distributed Decision-Making,” Seminar talk at the Center for Controls, Dynamical Systems, and Computation, UCSB, February 2020.
- “Designing for Emergent Security in Heterogeneous Human-Machine Teams,” 58th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Nice, France, December 2019.
- “Robust Methods for Influencing Strategic Behavior,” Seminar talk at the University of Colorado at Boulder, November 2019.
- “Incentives for Crypto-Collateralized Digital Assets,” Decentralized 2019, Athens, Greece, October 2019.
- “A Tragedy of Autonomy: Self-Driving Cars and Urban Congestion Externalities,” 57th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Allerton, Illinois, USA, September 2019.
- “Robust Methods for Influencing Strategic Behavior,” ASU Network Science seminar series, March 2019.
- “Projecting Network Games onto Sparse Graphs,” Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Pacific Grove, CA, USA, October 2018.
- I spoke in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in March, 2018.
- I spoke at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas, Arlington in February 2018.
- “The Benefit of Perversity in Taxation Mechanisms for Distributed Routing,” 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Melbourne, Australia, December 2017.
- “Are Multiagent Systems Resilient to Communication Failures?” 33rd Southern California Controls Workshop, University of California, Santa Barbara, October 2017.
- “The Perils of Ignoring Information in Distributed Learning,” ONR Science of Autonomy Program Review, Arlington, VA, USA, August 2017.
- “Fundamental Limits of Locally-Computed Incentives in Network Routing,” 28th International Conference on Game Theory, Stony Brook University, USA, July 2017.
- “Fundamental Limits of Locally-Computed Incentives in Network Routing,” 2017 American Control Conference, Seattle, USA, May 2017.
- “Avoiding Perverse Incentives in Affine Congestion Games,” 55th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Las Vegas, USA, December 2016. [Best student paper award finalist]
- “Optimal Mechanisms for Robust Coordination in Congestion Games,” 5th World Congress on Game Theory, Maastricht, The Netherlands, July 2016.
- “A Study on Discrimination for Robust Social Coordination,” 2016 American Control Conference, Boston, USA, July 2016. [Best talk in session award]
- “Can Price Discrimination Help Influence Social Behavior?” 30th Southern California Control Workshop, University of California, San Diego, USA, June 2016.
- “Optimal Mechanisms for Robust Coordination in Congestion Games,” 54th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Osaka, Japan, December 2015.
- “Influencing Social Behavior: A Robust Approach,” Robotics, Controls, and Dynamic Systems seminar series, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, November 2015.
- “Robust Mechanisms for Influencing Cyber-Social Systems,” Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Industry Advisory Board Meeting (poster session), University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, July 2015.
- “Optimal Mechanisms for Robust Coordination in Congestion Games,” 26th International Conference on Game Theory, Stony Brook University, USA, July 2015.
- “Robust Toll Design: Influencing Selfish Behavior in Unknown Price-Sensitive Users,” 3rd Midwest Workshop on Control and Game Theory, Ohio State University, USA. April 2014.
- “Social Coordination in Unknown Price-Sensitive Populations,” 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy. December 2013.
- “Social Coordination in Unknown Price-Sensitive Populations,” 24th International Conference on Game Theory, Stony Brook University, USA, July 2013.