2009 | 2008

Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Niles A. Pierce, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

In Pursuit of Programmable Molecular Technologies
This talk will describe our plans for programming the dynamic function of nucleic acid systems with application to molecular instrumentation and therapeutics.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008
David Soloveichik
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Programming with Well-Mixed Chemical Kinetics
If we specify a set of abstract rules for how we want molecules to behave, can we compile those rules down to chemical reality? I will show how to construct DNA-based chemical systems to approximate the dynamic behavior of arbitrary coupled mass action chemical equations. Thereby we transform mass action chemical kinetics from a language used to model existing chemical systems into a programming language for prescribing the behavior we wish to achieve.

The language of mass action chemical kinetics can express varied and sophisticated behaviors including stable attractors, oscillation, chaotic dynamics, signal processing, and logic. Because of single-molecule precision, discrete stochastic chemical kinetics exhibits an even wider range of behaviors, including computation on molecular counts. In last part of the talk, I will describe the theoretical limit to the complexity of stochastic kinetics by showing a formal construction for Turing-universal computation with arbitrarily small cumulative error probability over a priori unbounded computation time.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Peng Yin
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Towards Molecular Information Technology: Programming Nucleic Acid Self-Assembly
The main focus of my talk is to introduce a rudimentary molecular programming language for directing the dynamic behavior of synthetic nucleic acid systems (Ref. 1). The language is based on the graphical abstraction of a DNA hairpin motif, which physically implements a programmable kinetic trap. A high level molecular program specifies the placement and connection of such kinetic traps on a free energy landscape, and defines the system's reaction pathway and dynamic behavior. A variety of molecular programs were experimentally executed: the catalytic formation of DNA branch junctions, a cross catalytic circuit, the triggered growth of a binary molecular "tree", and the autonomous unidirectional motion of a DNA "walker".

I'll also briefly describe a related work where the abstraction of a 42 base single-stranded DNA motif is used to synthesize molecular tubes with monodisperse, programmable circumferences (Ref. 2). Single-step annealing results in the self-assembly of long tubes displaying monodisperse circumferences of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, or 20 DNA helices.

The above work, together with other molecular programming research (Ref. 3), collectively brings us closer to the goal of transforming molecular technology into information technology. The resultant molecular information technology will eventually permit a human to freely specify his or her functional needs in the molecular world, through a user-friendly digital molecular controller.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Mr. Shibulal, Co-Founder, Member of Board & COO, Infosys Technologies, Ltd
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Technology for the Bottom of the Pyramid
We live in a time of change. Revolutionary ideas, concepts and technology have continuously impacted the social, economic and cultural fabric of the world. In the last 4 decades of information revolution, we experienced Information Technology as a driver of growth and efficiency of the enterprises worldwide. As we observe the recent trends a bit closer, we see IT slowly drifting away from Enterprises and preparing itself to address the last frontier, the last mile. While there is peace and tranquility in the Mecca of technology, a revolution is happening on the fringes. Here the focus is on the common people and it is about strengthening the foundation of the global socio-economic structure. It is about "Empowering the Bottom of the Pyramid"

Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Erik Winfree, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Molecular Programming with DNA
Information can be stored in molecules and processed by molecular reactions. Molecular information processing is at the heart of all biological systems; might it soon also be at the heart of non-biological synthetic chemical systems? Perhaps yes. One technological approach comes from DNA nanotechnology and DNA computing, where DNA is used as a non-biological informational polymer that can be rationally designed to create a rich class of molecular systems -- for example, DNA molecules that self-assemble precisely, that fold into complex nanoscale objects, that act as mechanical actuators and molecular motors, and that make decisions based on digital and analog logic. I will argue that to fully exploit their design potential, we will need to invent programming languages for specifying the behavior of information-based molecular systems, to create theoretical tools for understanding and analyzing the behavior of molecular programs, to develop compilers that automate the design of molecules with the desired behaviors, and to expand experimental techniques so that the implementation and debugging of complex molecular systems becomes as commonplace and practical as computer programming.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Dave Rutledge, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Fossil Fuel Supplies, Alternatives, and Climate Change
This talk is an updated discussion of estimates of future fossil fuel supplies based on production records. Perhaps surprisingly, in the situations where it can be tested, this approach appears to give more stable and more accurate results that geological measurements. We will explore the implications for alternatives to fossil fuels and for climate modeling.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Channing Ahn, Senior Research Associate, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Beyond plug-in hybrids: Will hydrogen powered cars ever get us from A to B?
In the 2003 State of the Union address, the Freedom Fuel Initiative was launched so that "America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles." Since the time of that Address, research and development into hydrogen production and distribution have taken a back seat to the storage problem. Marketing demands of auto manufacturers dictate a 300 mile range for hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles and a refueling process that mimics your present gasoline station experience. Test vehicles that are presently on the road use high-pressure tanks to store hydrogen that are made of expensive carbon fiber composites. The goal of the Department of Energy's hydrogen storage program is to find alternatives to high-pressure tanks, in the form of chemical or metal hydride storage. These hydrides can store hydrogen at densities greater than liquid hydrogen avoiding some of the volumetric penalties that accompany compressed gas storage technology. However, the heat of reaction accompanying hydrogenation can generate 500kW of low-grade heat. Given the challenges of high gravimetric and volumetric hydrogen density storage and the thermodynamic limitations that effect refueling times, we will discuss some of the recent materials developments and strategies that are being considered for hydrogen storage for the transportation sector.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008
CS Undergraduates and Graduate Students
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

The Club for Computer Science
Undergraduate and graduate students interested in CS and IST have started a new club to maintain and improve the quality of life in CS at Caltech. The club has several activities planned for the year. Here are a few of the events:

• Student advising events
• A "Women in IST" event at which alumnae will talk about issues relating to IST and Women
• A "Reverse Recruiting Day" at which students will present demos and posters at booths, and invite prospective recruiters and other interested people to wander around.
• A Caltech CS blog
• A CS pre-frosh presentation to give prospective undergraduates an idea of CS at Caltech
• An IST career opportunities event at which alumni will advise students

At this lunch bunch, students will talk about the Club and then coordinate a discussion among students, staff and faculty of CS at Caltech

Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Adam Wierman, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Energy Efficient Computing: Challenges and Opportunities
Energy efficiency has long been a focus for mobile and embedded devices, but in recent years energy efficiency has become a driving design element in data centers, networks, and other "land-held" devices. This growing focus is the result of increasing energy-related costs as well as environmental impacts. In this talk, we will explore some of the important energy cost and usage trends in data centers and networks, and describe a few of the key areas where there is significant potential for research to lead to design improvements.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Alumni from industry will talk about their experiences and give advice.
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Students have asked speakers to address the questions listed below.

Questions for alumni from industry:

Does it help to get a PhD if your goal is to work in industry? (Do you plan to get an advanced degree later? For example MBA, MS or PhD? How difficult is it to return back to school after a few years?)

How helpful is research experience when looking for industrial jobs? (because students often have trouble deciding between internships and SURF)

Could you tell us more about educational support from most companies for Master's degrees?

What is the process of switching groups or positions?

Coming out of your undergraduate studies, what plans did you have for your career? Did it turn out the way you planned? How have your career changed since then

What are the tradeoffs between working for a very small startup versus working for an established company?

Do you have advice for students planning to start their own companies?

Does it help to take "business" courses or economics courses if someone wants to enter Wall Street (finance)?

Questions for graduating seniors:

How did you decide which companies to interview with? How should we decide?

Do you think doing an internship with a company is more helpful than a SURF in getting an industrial job?

What sorts of questions are asked at interviews? How should we prepare for the job interviews and applications?

Are companies looking for specific courses? Specific experiences? Programming projects? Programming languages?

Does being from Caltech help? Hurt? Make no difference?

How did you decide whether to go to grad school or industry?

Do you plan to attend graduate school later? For an MBA, MS or PhD?

Could you tell us more about educational support from most companies for Master's degrees (if you know about this from the companies that you have interviewed/worked with)?

Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Jeremy Ma, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

An Inside Look at the Multi-Agent Robotics Lab
Mobile agent communication and control is a widely studied area in robotics, with application in various fields of science. The Multi-Agent Robotics Lab in the Mechanical Engineering Department consists of several mobile, robotic agents each equipped with sensing, on-board computing, and wireless communication. In this talk, a brief introduction to the testbed, its capabilities and applications will be presented.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Yury Lifshits, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

The Architecture of the Web
Initially the Web was defined as a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. Its structure is regulated by World Wide Web Consortium via standards like URL, HTML, CSS and RSS. The Web of 2008 is a system of data, web applications and people. Necessity of syncronization raised the next generation of standards: OpenID, OAuth, Social Graph API, Microformats and various widget platforms (F8, Open Social, Firefox, iPhone, iGoogle, Wordpress, Drupal, Salesforce.com).

We start with systematic overview of Web architecture. Then we discuss research agenda in the field: data flow (publishing, synchronization and exchange), web operating systems and identity management. Finally we present our ongoing project "New Approaches to Online Marketing".

Tuesday, May 6, 2008
John Doyle, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Rules of Engagement:
The Architecture of Robust, Evolvable Networks
Biological systems are robust and evolvable in the face of even large changes in environment and system components, yet can simultaneously be extremely fragile to small perturbations. Such universally robust yet fragile (RYF) complexity is found wherever we look. The amazing evolution of microbes into humans (robustness of lineages on long timescales) is punctuated by mass extinctions (extreme fragility). Diabetes, obesity, cancer, and autoimmune diseases are side-effects of biological control and compensatory mechanisms so robust as to normally go unnoticed. RYF complexity is not confined to biology. The complexity of technology is exploding around us, but in ways that remain largely hidden. Modern institutions and technologies facilitate robustness and accelerate evolution, but enable catastrophes on a scale unimaginable without them (from network and market crashes to war, epidemics, and global warming). Understanding RYF means understanding architecture — the most universal, high-level, persistent elements of organization — and protocols. Protocols define how diverse modules interact, and architecture defines how sets of protocols are organized.

Insights into the architectural and organizational principles of networked systems can be drawn from three converging research themes. 1) With molecular biology’s description of components and growing attention to systems biology, the organizational principles of biological networks are becoming increasingly apparent. Biologists are articulating richly detailed explanations of biological complexity, robustness, and evolvability that point to universal principles. 2) Advanced technology’s complexity is now approaching biology’s. While the components differ, there is striking convergence at the network level of architecture and the role of layering, protocols, and feedback control in structuring complex multiscale modularity. New theories of the Internet and related networking technologies have led to test and deployment of new protocols for high performance networking. 3) A new mathematical framework for the study of complex networks suggests that this apparent network-level evolutionary convergence within/between biology/technology is not accidental, but follows necessarily from the universal system requirements to be efficient, adaptive, evolvable, and robust to perturbations in their environment and component parts.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Krishna Palem, Rice University
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

What To Do About The End of Moore's Law (Probably)?
Many claim that the laws of physics dictating the exponentially improving benefits of Moore’s Law will end in the next 10 to 20 years. The argument for the end of Moore’s Law is based, in part, on an analysis that switching devices cannot function deterministically as feature sizes get reduced to molecular levels. Moore’s Law could, however, continue provided systems with probabilistic switches could process information usefully. My research suggests that this is indeed possible in contexts where the "quality" of the results of the computation is perceptually determined by our senses—audio and video information being significant examples. To demonstrate this principle, I will show how CMOS-based devices, circuits and computing architectures whose correctness is characterized probabilistically can be used effectively. I will show that significant (a multiplicative factor of 2 or more) energy and performance gains can be achieved, while trading a perceptually tolerable level of error—through probabilistic adders and multipliers, applied in the context of finite impulse response filters and FFT engines processing video and audio data in digital signal processing. Quantifying the human tolerance for error, we expect, will be ultimately based on neurobiological models. Conceptually, our thesis recommending tolerating error in the switching devices in return for savings in cost, is analogous to a parametric extension of Simon’s notion if satisficing—we will conclude the talk by dwelling on this analog and its implications to probabilistic design of ultra large-scale integrated (ULSI) circuits in the future.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Tom Heaton, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Designing the Next Generation of Seismographic Network
I will briefly describe the design and capabilities of the Southern California Seismic Network that is a cooperative project of Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey. This network consists of several hundred digital stations that continuously telemeter data to a central site for processing and archival. The current technology allows rapid access to widely distributed ground motion information over an extremely wide range of amplitudes (200 dB) and frequencies (30 to 0.001 Hz). However, the relatively small number of stations means that is not possible to observe unaliased seismic wavefields in either the ground or buildings. I will discuss the possibility of increasing the spatial density of seismographic stations in southern California by several orders of magnitude. This involves development of a distributed seismic network where instruments are maintained by affiliated agencies and individuals.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Chris Umans, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Randomness and Pseudorandomness: The Computational Perspective
Computational complexity views randomness as a resource to be conserved, much like running time or storage space, while "pseudo-randomness" is defined in terms of fooling a computationally-bounded observer. These unique persepectives lead to a number of widely applicable and powerful techniques, and form the basis for one of the most active areas of complexity theory.

In this talk I'll give a tour of some of these techniques -- randomness-efficient sampling, explicit constructions, and pseudo-random generators -- with example applications in game theory, coding theory, data structures, and complexity.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Shankar Kalyanaraman, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

It Is (NP-)Hard To Rationalize Marriages
Given a set of observed economic choices, can one infer preferences and/or utility functions for the players that are consistent with the data? Questions of this type are called rationalization or revealed preference problems in the economic literature, and are the subject of a rich body of work.

From the computer science perspective, it is natural to study the complexity of rationalization in various scenarios. We consider a class of rationalization problems in which the economic data is expressed by a collection of matchings, and the question is whether there exist preference orderings for the nodes under which all the matchings are stable.

We show that the rationalization problem for one-one matchings is NP-complete. We propose two natural notions of approximation, and show that the problem is hard to approximate to within a constant factor, under both. On the positive side, we describe a simple algorithm that achieves a 3/4-approximation ratio for one of these approximation notions. We also prove similar results for a version of many-one matching.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Azita Emami, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

High-speed Interconnects in Modern VLSI Systems
The implementation of high-performance computing systems strongly relies on the feasibility of high-bandwidth data communication between integrated circuit components (IC’s). Moreover, future multi-core processors will need fast and robust intra-chip data transfer between the cores and memory units. Current trends of digital systems indicate that the amount of processing of each component or unit is expected to continue to increase exponentially at least for the next 10 years. In order to scale the communication bandwidth with the same trend, both the number of IO’s and the data-rate per IO link need to increase. A number of limitations such as the bandwidth of the wires, area and power consumption per IO, interferences, and characteristics of the highly scaled devices make the design of high-speed IO’s very difficult.

This talk will focus on low-power system and circuit solutions for parallel chip-to-chip interconnections and intra-chip networks. As the data-rates over the conventional wires increase, the complexity of required equalization and coding schemes increase rapidly. The design challenges of wireline data communication and the possibility of using optics for interconnection at short distances will be discussed. We will focus on a number of novel low-power solutions for both electrical and optical signaling, and the scaling properties these solutions for the future systems.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Ulrich Pinkall, Berlin University of Technology
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

What Game Engines Can Do For Mathematical Visualization
Surfaces with constant (mean or Gaussian) curvature are a classical topic in Differential Geometry. The shape of such surfaces is usually quite complex and poses a real challenge for Computer Graphics and interactive visualization. We will demonstrate that an optimal environment for doing mathematical experiments with surfaces is to put them in a virtual landscape where one can walk on the surfaces and interact with them in a way modeled after first person computer games.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Jeanne Holm, JPL
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Virtual Worlds and Space Exploration
Populations of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, have grown rapidly. This talk discusses using virtual worlds for bringing lots of people into the NASA mission, letting them participate in the day to day work and successes of the U.S. space agency. NASA has established several islands in Second Life. NASA CoLab and Explorer Island are the two main public entrance points. These areas are geared at working with any person who is interested in learning more about NASA or, better yet, participating in a NASA mission for exploration in this virtual world. While NASA CoLab focuses on a place to host meetings and talks, Explorer Island (created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) is meant to be an immersive environment for interacting with spacecraft, being at a live launch of the Space Shuttle or a mission to Mars, talking to NASA scientists and engineers, sharing your ideas for space exploration in international workshops, and walking on the surface of another world. Come in world and look for Jet Burns (Charles White) or Devery Barrymore (Jeanne Holm) and we'll give you a tour!

Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Hsuan-Tien Lin, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

From Ordinal Ranking to Binary Classification
Ordinal ranking is an important concept in modeling our preferences. We rank hotels by stars to represent their quality; we give feed-backs to products on Amazon using a scale from one to five; we say that the weather is hot, warm, cool, or cold without referring to the actual temperature. The wide applications of ranking range from social science to behavioral science to information retrieval. For yet another example, in 2006, Netflix (an on-line DVD rental company) announced a million-dollar-prize challenge for building a better automatic personalized movie ranking system, and the prize is heating up the competition in machine learning and related areas.

Many machine learning approaches are designed in recent years to understand ordinal ranking better, but the design process can be time-consuming. Our work presents a novel alternative -- a reduction framework that systematically transforms ordinal ranking to simpler yes/no questions, i.e., binary classification.

Then, well-studied binary classification approaches can be effortlessly casted as new ordinal ranking ones. Furthermore, the reduction framework reveals a strong theoretical connection between ordinal ranking and binary classification, and allows us to easily extend well-known theoretical results for binary classification to new ones for ordinal ranking. In this talk, I will discuss the intuition and the construction of the reduction framework, as well as its theoretical and algorithmic merits, using the Netflix challenge as an example.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Paul De Martini, Southern California Edison
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Partnering with our Customers for a Smarter, Cleaner Energy Future
SmartConnect, a new effort by Southern California Edison, will enable the utility to manage increasing demand for electricity from customers and provide environmental benefits by deploying a smart meter system which could reduce peak demand by as much as 1,000 megawatts - the output of a large power plant - as customers reduce some peak electricity usage and shift some peak usage to off-peak periods of the day when power costs less. Additional savings include lower labor costs due to the use of wireless data transfer from meters to the utility rather than manual meter reading. Paul De Martini, Director of SmartConnect, will describe the program, its development plan, and the technological challenges it faces.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Alex Groce & Klaus Havelund
Caltech, JPL
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Asking the Right Questions and Understanding the Answers in Software Testing
When hunting for buried treasure, it is essential to both walk over the right spot on the beach and to carry a working metal detector. When hunting for the subtle software defects that can plague (and crash) space missions, it is important to run the right tests and to actually detect incorrect behaviors that appear during those tests. We present a brief tutorial component, describing some of the challenges of choosing tests and monitoring tests for symptoms of faults. We also present ongoing research in responding to these challenges in the context of JPL flight software, including the in-development file systems for the Mars Science Laboratory mission (JPL's next Mars rover, launching in 2009).

Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Erik Winfree, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Learning to Program Chemistry
Biological organisms are extremely sophisticated self-organized chemical systems. Their complexity dwarfs anything produced by modern chemical industries. The difference can be ascribed in large part to biological systems being information-processing machines: DNA, RNA, and proteins carry molecularly-encoded messages that direct all of life's processes. Biology is programmable chemistry. Can we learn how to program chemistry? How will this expand the capabilities of synthetic chemistry? Might non-biological chemistries also be programmable? What kinds of models of computation are needed for understanding how to program chemistry and the limits to doing so? I cannot give conclusive answers to these questions, but I will present examples of what we have learned while creating self-assembling structures, molecular machines, and logic circuits built out of DNA, RNA, and the occasional enzyme. I will argue that the key to unleashing the revolutionary potential of programmable molecular systems lies in understanding the design space and managing their complexity as information processing systems -- issues that are fundamental to computer science.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Paul Upchurch, Caltech Computer Science & JPL
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Visualization of Large Scale Environments
The number of people playing online games continues to increase each year. Game engine technology is generating innovations in hardware and software. This project investigates the use of game engines at JPL for interactive visualizations of explorations of the solar system.

This talk describes GoView a scriptable game engine which is tailored for rendering spacecraft trajectories in the solar system. Rendering trajectories across the solar system poses challenges that are not encountered in popular online games such as Doom. In particular, the game engine must be able to handle spatial scenes larger than six orders of magnitude. The talk describes the problems encountered and how they are solved in GoView.

Interactive visualizations of explorations of the solar system are being developed at JPL for public outreach, mission planning and mission operations.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Joel W. Burdick, Caltech
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

Engineering Interfaces to Damaged Nervous Systems
This talk will introduce some of the challenges involved in trying to develop technology that can partially restore some functionality to people with severe neural deficiencies. The first part of the talk (which is based on joint work with Prof. Richard Andersen and Prof. Y.C. Tai of Caltech) will focus on neural prostheses. A neuroprosthetic is a brain-machine interface that can potentially enable a paralyzed human, via the use of surgically implanted electrode arrays, and associated computer decoding algorithms, to control external electromechanical devices. The problem of decoding the prosthetic user's intent from the recorded neural sisgnals is a problem in inference, or estimation. A few of the estimation techniques that have been used to solve this problem will be reviewed. Progress on making adaptive electrodes that autonomously optimize the quality of the brain-machine interface will also be reviewed.

The second half of the talk (which is based on joint work with Prof. Reggie Edgerton of UCLA and Prof. Y.C. Tai of Caltech) will focus on the problems involved in partially restoring locomotion after a severe spinal cord injury. While there are an enormous number complex issues surrounding a spinal injury, this talk will focus on the use of drug therapy, automated machines for physical therapy, and a new class of epidural spinal cord stimulators to help with the locomotion rehabilitation process. Each of these therapeutic components also have associated computational and algorithmic problems. For example, we are currently trying (in collaboration with Prof. Yaser Abu-Mostafa of Caltech) to formulate the problem of selecting the correct electrode stimulation protocols as a problem in kernel learning.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Jason Marden and Adam Wierman
74 Jorgensen, 12:00 pm

A Game Theoretic Formulation of the Sensor Allocation Problem
Interdisciplinary research at the junction of information sciences, economics and game theory offers new solutions to several problems. This talk looks at applying game theory to solve a problem in cooperative control in distributed systems: the optimal locations of sensors in a sensor network.

This talk is introductory. The problem domain and basic concepts will be described. Detailed proofs will be given in other seminars and are also found in papers.

This talk presents a view of cooperative control using the language of learning in games. Specifically, we look at the cooperative control problem of dynamic sensor allocation. We formulate the sensor allocation problem as a noncooperative game where the decision makers are the sensors. In this setting, each sensor is assigned a local objective or utility function and is given the ability to autonomously alter it's position and sensing activity in real time. The distributed nature of the decision making allows for robustness to communication failures, sensor failures, and environmental changes. In this talk we will discuss several methods for designing the sensors' local utility functions. We measure the efficacy of a particular utility design in two ways: (i) Does a Nash equilibrium exist? (ii) How efficient is a Nash equilibrium when compared to the optimal allocation?