TARK

Back in 1992, I had the privilege of attending my first TARK conference as a young Ph.D. student. In those early days, the TARK conferences were held at Pacific Grove, California, between Monterey and Carmel, in the green and scouts-style Asilomar conference center---so fit for a young, energetic and aspiring inter-disciplinary conference. That conference was an extremely stimulating experience for me, and the discussions I had with the participants there led to several of the papers that I wrote in the years that followed. It was hence a particularly pleasant task for me to serve, 17 years afterwards, as the program committee chair for TARK XII. Over the years, the TARK conference series has had the chance to visit several continents and, after a beautiful tour around the world, it is now back to California, this time to Stanford on July 6-8, 2009.

Has TARK become more mature, settled-down along these years? I doubt it. I enjoyed very much working together with the other 16 members of the program committee: Krzysztof Apt (University of Amsterdam and CWI), Johan van Benthem (University of Amsterdam and Stanford University), Felix Brandt (University of Munich), Amanda Friedenberg (Arizona State University), Rica Gonen (Yahoo! Research), Joe Halpern (Cornell University), Gil Kalai (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Daniel Lehmann (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Mar- tin Meier (Institut d'Analisi Economica, CSIC, Barcelona), Eric Pacuit (Stanford University), Andres Perea (Maastricht University), Riccardo Pucella (Northeastern University), Olivier Roy (University of Groningen), Burkhard Schipper (University of California at Davis), Sonja Smets (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and Olivier Tercieux (CNRS, Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques). They all worked very hard, with lively and even heated discussions about the merits and faults of the 77 submissions, giving rise eventually to 29 accepted papers. To accommodate the relatively large number of accepted papers, 8 out of them are presented in a poster session---a new custom established at TARK XI. The group of authors of this TARK's papers as well as the program committee itself consist of both young and more senior people. This span of ages, together with the continuous evolution of topics of interest along the TARK series, attest that TARK today is ever more relevant, thriving and vital.

This TARK we have the pleasure of having four invited speakers: Adam Brandenburger (New York University), John Searle (Berkeley), Yoav Shoham (Stanford), and Susan Athey (Harvard). Susan is a joint invited speaker for TARK and the Electronic Commerce (EC) conference. EC has a partial time overlap with TARK at Stanford, and we are grateful to the people heading EC---Lance Fortnow, Pearl Pu, and David Pennock---for the collaboration and the coordination between EC and TARK.

TARK XII is hosted by the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB). Many thanks are due to Eric Pacuit (Stanford), who served as the local organizer, and to Yossi Feinberg (Stanford), who was instrumental in arranging the GSB connection. Special thanks also to Yoav Shoham (Stanford) for his support for the conference.