Research
I am interested in the strategic interactions of intelligent agents, how collective intelligence develops, and the application of game theory and mechanism design to the study of multiagent system safety. My previous work included a theoretical analysis of bounded rationality in repeated games and mechanism design for agents with computational limitations.In 2025, I spent my sabbatical working with the Collaborative Intelligent Systems group at the Basis Research Institute. Our paper on inferring the strategies birds use in group foraging environments was presented at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Data on the Brain and Mind. This research included using graph neural networks to predict the trajectories of agents from real and simulated data.
I am also interested in sequence learning using neural networks, an interest I haven't been able to shake since completing a master's thesis on recurrent neural networks.
Publications
Books:- O'Connell, Thomas C. (in progress, online). An Animated Introduction to Computer Science with Processing and Java .
- O'Connell, Thomas C. (2013). What Is a Computer and What Can It Do? An Algorithms-Oriented Introduction to the Theory of Computation. College Publications.
Papers:
- Aitsahalia, I., Botch, T., Gu, S., O'Connell, T., Siegel, R., Peterson, R., Batenkov, D., & Mackevicius, E. (2025). Inferring cognitive strategies from groups of animals in natural environments. NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Data on the Brain and Mind.
- O'Connell, Thomas C. (2009).
A Survey of Graph Algorithms Under Extended Streaming Models of Computation.
Chapter 17 in Fundamental Problems in Computing: Essays in Honor of Professor Daniel J. Rosenkrantz,
edited by S. S. Ravi and S. K. Shukla.
Springer-Verlag.
- O'Connell, Thomas C. and Richard E. Stearns (2005).
Mechanism Design for Software Agents with Complete Information.
Decision Support Systems, Volume 39, Issue 2, Pages 197-217.
(This is an expanded version O'Connell and Stearns (2002) below. )
- O'Connell, Thomas C. and Richard E. Stearns (2003).
On Finite Strategy Sets for Finitely Repeated Zero-Sum Games.
Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 43, Issue 1, Pages 107-136.
- O'Connell, Thomas C. and Richard E. Stearns (2002).
Polynomial Time Mechanisms for Collective Decision Making..
In Parsons, S., Gmytrasiewicz, P. & Wooldridge, M. J. (Eds.),
Game Theory and Decision Theory in Agent Based Systems. Pages 197-216.
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Theses:
- O'Connell, Thomas C. (2000).
Bounded Rationality in Repeated Games and Mechanism Design for Agents in
Computational Settings.
Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, The University at Albany, State University
of New York, May 2000.
abstract/ full paper. - O'Connell, Thomas C. (1995).
Using Periodically Attentive Units to Extend the Temporal Capacity
of Simple Recurrent Networks. Master's Thesis,
Department of Computer Science, The University at Albany, State University
of New York, July 1995.
abstract/ full paper.
Preprints:
- Phillips, Flip, Thomas C. O'Connell, and Oliver W. Layton (2010).
The Traveling Salesman Problem
in the Natural Environment.
Nature Precedings.
https://doi.org/10.1038/npre.2010.4960.1