Collective Decision Making in Combinatorial Domains
This is a preliminary website for the NWO Vidi project "Collective Decision
Making in Combinatorial Domains",
which is led by Ulle Endriss and will run from January 2008 until December 2012
at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University
of Amsterdam.
The project will bring together ideas from computer science,
artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, computational logic, and social
choice theory to develop and analyse mechanisms for collective decision making
when the set of possible agreements has a combinatorial structure. Exemplary
applications include resource allocation problems with indivisible goods
and the study of voting rules for committee elections.
Keywords: computational social choice, multiagent resource allocation,
preference modelling, social software
Open Positions
We currently have two vacancies in this project:
* PhD Student (4 year position -- deadline 1 June 2008)
* Postdoctoral Research Fellow (3 year position -- filled)
The latest planning foresees that the postdoc will be working on issues in
multiagent resource allocation, while the PhD student will be concentrating
on logic-based approaches to modelling collective decision making mechanisms.
However, there is some flexibility in this and the exact programme of work will
be
determined together with the successful candidates. Everyone with a serious
research interest
in computational
social choice is encouraged to apply to either position. The successful
candidates will be regular employees at the University of
Amsterdam. Salary and employment conditions will be in line with the
usual regulations for academic staff at Dutch universities.
Please follow the links above for further details on the open positions
and the application procedure.
Project Summary
Collective decision making is the process of mapping the individual preference
profiles of
independent agents into a joint decision. The need for collective decision
making
mechanisms is abundant, not just in human society, but also in a number of
scientific
and technological application areas. These range from logistics, over grid
computing, to
e-democracy. The alternatives to be decided upon often have a combinatorial
structure:
an alternative is characterised by a tuple of variables, each ranging over a
finite domain.
For instance, if the objective is to divide a number of indivisible goods
amongst several
agents, then each agent must be able to reason about his or her preferences
over sets of
goods, of which there are exponentially many. Classical approaches to
collective decision
making, developed in social choice theory, do not take the computational
limitations
induced by the combinatorial nature of the problem into account. The overall
aim of this
project is to develop a comprehensive theory of how agreements between
independent
decision makers are formed when the domain of possible outcomes has a
combinatorial
structure. Specific topics to be addressed include the compact representation of
preferences in combinatorial domains; the development of distributed approaches
to
computing fair and economically efficient allocations of resources for varying
interpretations of the terms fairness and efficiency; and the logic-based
modelling and
complexity-theoreti c analysis of collective decision making mechanisms. The
project will
employ the tools and techniques of computer science in a broad sense, including
computational logic, artificial intelligence and multiagent systems, whilst
also drawing
heavily upon ideas from mathematical economics, in particular social choice
theory.
Related Links
More information on this research area and on related events and activities
is available here:
* What is Computational Social Choice?
* Survey Article on Computational Social Choice
* Survey Article on Multiagent Resource Allocation
* Logic and Computation Research Programme at the ILLC
* Computational Social Choice Seminar at the ILLC
Contact
For further information on the project or the open positions, please feel free
to contact Ulle Endriss.
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