We are living in an era of technology explosion. While resources, products and information become increasingly accessible to common users, the individuals nowadays are more aware than ever of their own right, and more capable than ever of deciding for their own good. This trend forces the old organization governing the social welfare to adapt. Eventually we ask how to balance the individual fairness and the global goodness. The social planners would have no choice but decentralize their power of managing globally, and leave the decisions to individuals. Meanwhile, they still keep the resource and have the duty to offer the individuals the right incentives in order to keep the society on the right track.

The applied mathematics community is eager to participate and contribute to this social transition. We realize that many mathematical tools, such as control theory, game theory and machine learning, are already available or under quick development for related applications.

In this summer school, we would like to gather the leading researchers and young research fellows on contract theory, mean field games, high-dimension learning and so on, to allow them exchange their understandings of how to design the incentives to lead an efficient decentralization. Also, we would like to hear from the practitioners of energy market, telecommunication, finance and so on, what the real challenge we face.

The mathematics materials we select for the summer school would be those developed during the last five years, and we believe, becoming the objects of intense research in the upcoming years, so that they represent both the new mathematical perspectives and the pertinent ideas in terms of applications.