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SUMMARY:Ordinal Preference Representation and Aggregation: Game-Theoretic 
 and Combinatorial Aspects of Computational Social Choice
DTSTART:20120615T110000
DTEND:20120615T120000
DTSTAMP:20260407T101134Z
UID:4e4fdfcce4319c1375b9709e547552db5f3781bf5e16372092f08700
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Lirong Xia\, Harvard University\, USA\nAbstract:\nFor at l
 east two thousand years\, voting has been used as one of the most effectiv
 e ways to aggregate people’s ordinal preferences.\nIn the last 50 years\
 , the rapid development of Computer Science has revolutionize every aspect
  of the world\, including social choice (voting)\; and meanwhile\, social 
 choice has also found applications in many fields in Computer Science\, in
 cluding multiagent systems\, recommendation systems\, and crowdsourcing. T
 his motivates us to study (1) conceptually\, how computational thinking ch
 anges the traditional theory of voting\, and (2) methodologically\, how to
  better use voting for preference/information aggregation with the help of
  Computer Science.\nIn this talk\, I will briefly discuss two research dir
 ections\, one for each question asked above. The first focuses on investig
 ating how computational thinking affects the game-theoretic aspects of vot
 ing. I will discuss the rationale and possibility of using computational c
 omplexity to protect voting from a type of strategic behavior of the voter
 s\, called manipulation. The second studies a voting setting called Combin
 atorial Voting\, where the set of alternatives is exponentially large and 
 has a combinatorial structure. I will focus on the design and evaluation o
 f novel mechanisms for combinatorial voting that balance computational eff
 iciency and the expressivity of the voting language\, in light of some rec
 ent developments in Artificial Intelligence.\n\nShort bio:\nLirong Xia is 
 a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Societ
 y at Harvard University. He got a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2011  and 
 an M.A. in Economics in 2010\, both from Duke University. His research foc
 uses on the intersection of computer science and microeconomics\, in parti
 cular computational social choice\, game theory\, mechanism design\, and p
 rediction markets.
LOCATION:BC 01 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%2001
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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