Workshop on Social Choice Theory
To mark the occasion of Sirin Botan's PhD defense, we are organising a one-day workshop in the centre of Amsterdam. There will be no registration fee, but we ask that you register here for the workshop so that we can keep track of the number of attendees.
Covid measures: In the Netherlands, masks currently are required on all public transport, and in public spaces such as supermarkets and shops. This also includes university buildings. Regulations require everyone moving around the building to wear a mask, and we encourage you to keep it on also when seated. Many places such as restaurants, cinemas, and museums require a coronavirus pass, though the university currently does not. We encourage everyone to take a self-test before coming to the workshop location. Social distancing (1.5-metre-rule) is required everywhere, except in places where access is limited to people with a coronavirus pass, such as a restaurant.
Attending the defense: Everyone is welcome to attend the PhD defense on Friday at 13:00. You can either follow the live stream or attend in person. The latter requires completing a registration form (not the one linked to above) in advance. Please contact us to get access (see bottom of this page).
13:45-14:00 | welcome |
14:00-14:45 | Marija Slavkovik (University of Bergen) |
AI Ethics as a Social Choice Problem AI should be researched, developed, deployed and used in light of human values. Who should decide what these values are? It has been argued that this decision should be a social choice problem. If we should just vote on it, should the majority decide? These are the questions explored in the talk. | |
14:45-15:30 | Piotr Faliszewski (AGH University of Science and Technology) |
Map of Approval Elections Map of elections is a tool for visualizing a set of elections coming
either from real-life or from synthetic distributions. It shows
similarity between elections and can help in visualizing their
properties (such us the existence of a Condorcet winner or a score
according to a given voting rule). However, so far, all the maps of
elections made concerned ordinal elections. In this talk I will present
preliminary results regarding making a map of approval elections. In
particular, I will describe two natural metrics for measuring distance
between elections and I will discuss a number of different synthetic
distributions of elections, as well as the features of the elections
they provide. For example, we will be wondering what is a natural
counterpart of the Mallows distribution in the approval setting. I will
also show preliminary results visualizing similarities between
approval-based multiwinner voting rules.
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15:30-16:00 | coffee break |
16:00-16:45 | Simon Rey (University of Amsterdam) |
Non-Standard Models for Participatory Budgeting In this talk I will discuss several recent papers on the topic of participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting is usually studied as an extension of multi-winner voting, where selecting a candidate results in paying a cost, and where a budget limit constrains the cost of the selected candidates. Although highly relevant for the technical analysis, this approach does not fully capture participatory budgeting processes as they happen in real life. This talk aims at presenting other models for participatory budgeting that more closely resemble these real-life processes. We will discuss the idea of a two-stage model where agents first propose some projects and then vote over the shortlisted projects. We will also have a look at what changes when the process is repeated over several years. Finally, we will have a look at how to include additional constraints on top of the budget limit: quotas over categories of projects, dependencies between the projects, ... | |
16:45-17:30 | Felix Brandt (TU Munich) |
Donor Coordination We study a mechanism design problem where a community of agents wishes to fund public projects via voluntary monetary contributions by the community members. An important application of this setting is donor coordination, which allows philanthropists to find an efficient and mutually agreeable distribution of their donations. We analyze various distribution rules (including the Nash product rule and the conditional utilitarian rule) and settle a long-standing open question of Bogomolnaia, Moulin, and Stong (2005) by showing that no strategyproof and efficient rule can guarantee that at least one approved project of each agent receives a positive amount of money. The proof reasons about 386 preference profiles and was obtained using a computer-aided method involving SAT solvers.
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