Abstract: Until recently, cognitive radios represented the "Medical Marijuana" of wireless research --- rhetoric on both sides characterized by wishful thinking, distrust, and vested interests; but the underlying "technology" in question was still very much illegal. Recent steps taken by the FCC in the TV bands (along with similar moves in UK and others being considered in Europe) demonstrate that governments are serious about change, and just this summer, the USA's President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report that advocated expanding this approach beyond the TV bands. Suddenly, we have the real possibility of an ecosystem of devices, each acting with their own interests, while also influencing the payoffs of others. At this point, game theory has got to be relevant. In this talk, I will give an introduction to the opportunity in the context of the TV Whitespaces. I'll use some simulations based on real FCC data to give a quantitative sense of the tradeoffs involved. I will then elucidate what "light handed regulation" could mean in the cognitive radio context, giving a simple model to reveal something about the overhead and tradeoffs involved. The interesting thing is that the "mechanism design" here also involves being able to adjust the nature of the devices themselves, something that we presumably can't do as easily for human agents! Bio: Anant Sahai (BS '94 UC Berkeley, MS '96 MIT, PhD '01 MIT) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, where he joined the faculty in 2002. He is a member of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and the Wireless Foundations Center (WiFo). In 2001, he spent a year at the wireless startup Enuvis developing adaptive signal processing algorithms for extremely sensitive GPS receivers implemented using software defined radio. Prior to that, he was a graduate student at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research interests are in wireless communication, decentralized control, and information theory. He is particularly interested in delay, feedback, and complexity from an information-theoretic perspective, ideas of "implicit information flows" in decentralized-control, and in cognitive radio from a regulatory perspective.