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Stylised avatar of Lakshmi Ravi

Lakshmi Ravi

Long-tenured contributor

Based in Chennai
Node-cell kalman-04
ORCID 0000-3358-6618-1267

Research

Lakshmi works on the joint-utility side of negotiation: how should asymmetric negotiation outcomes be measured, what counts as exploitation of a weaker counterparty, and how does the substrate's commitments machinery support actually-fair outcomes rather than nominally-fair ones.

She is a co-author of the negotiation-protocols benchmark and the cell-internal scoring functions that are used to grade outcomes on it. The scoring functions have been adopted by two external research groups working in related areas; Lakshmi is candid that the scoring is a research question, not a settled methodology.

Lakshmi is based in Chennai and works asynchronously with the rest of kalman-04 — the cell's working cadence is deliberately async to accommodate its three time zones. She maintains the cell's weekly written rollup.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, IIT Madras, 2015. Postdoc at Microsoft Research India, 2015-2017.

Prior to alphabell: MSR India; Hyperion Cognitive Lab; Praxis AI Studies.

Selected publications

Full publications index →

Recent talks

  • Joint utility under asymmetry, AAMAS 2024
  • Substrate primitives for negotiation, ICLR 2024 workshop
Working with

Lakshmi is currently part of node-cell kalman-04, working under the Agentic engineering research axis. The cell is open to substantive correspondence from researchers working on adjacent problems; route requests through kalman-04@alphabell.com or directly to Lakshmi at lakshmi-ravi@alphabell.com.