Computational social choice is an interdisciplinary field of study at the interface of social choice theory and computer science, promoting an exchange of ideas in both directions. On the one hand, it is concerned with the application of techniques developed in computer science, such as complexity analysis or algorithm design, to the study of social choice mechanisms, such as voting procedures or fair division algorithms. On the other hand, computational social choice is concerned with importing concepts from social choice theory into computing. For instance, social welfare orderings originally developed to analyse the quality of resource allocations in human society are equally well applicable to problems in multiagent systems or network design. (Click here to find out more.)
The aim of the COMSOC workshop series is to bring together different communities: computer scientists interested in computational issues in social choice; people working in artificial intelligence and multiagent systems who are using ideas from social choice to organise societies of artificial software agents; logicians interested in the logic-based specification and analysis of social procedures; and last but not least people coming from social choice theory itself. For the time being, we intend to hold these workshops on a biannual basis. The workshop series is coordinated by Ulle Endriss and Jérôme Lang, co-chairs of the first edition held in 2006.