Title:
Topics in Computational Social Choice: Voting, Stable Matchings, and Fair Division

Abstract:
Computational social choice is a field at the intersection of social choice theory, theoretical computer science, and artificial intelligence. Its roots date back to the early 90s, when it provided a novel treatment of voting rules as computational artefacts and posed and studied complexity questions that traditional social choice theory had not addressed. Today, it is a very active field that, among other subareas, hosts research in modern voting systems and on matching and fair division problems. The talk will attempt a quick (and inevitably partial) journey on this fascinating field by giving a short overview of my recent involvement in these three topics. I will first discuss the trend of liquid democracy and my work on its limitations as a tool for learning a ground truth. We will then revisit the well-known stable matching problem and present the concept of stable fractional matchings. Finally, I will introduce a compelling fairness notion for random allocations of items among agents.

 Join on Zoom Friday May 7th at 2PM