2nd Semester 2017/18: Judgment Aggregation in Computational Social Choice

Instructors

Sirin Botan and Zoi Terzopoulou.

If you are interested in this project, please contact the instructors by email.

ECTS

6

Description

This project will be a dive into the field of judgment aggregation (JA). JA is an area of computational social choice (COMSOC); a field which studies how to aggregate individual opinions into a group opinion. In JA, these individual opinions are yes/no evaluations over a set of propositions. Think of a jury which is trying to collectively decide whether a defendant is guilty, based on their individual opinions over  several criteria. JA is a relatively new field within COMSOC so many of  the results covered will be from recent research.

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the project topic, there will be a lot of freedom to explore your own interests in the presentations and the final paper; research in the field is done by economists, philosophers and computer scientists alike.

Organisation

The first week (June 4-8) the instructors will give four lectures introducing the students to the field of judgment aggregation (JA). The second week (June 11-15)  students will give presentations on a paper of their choice from the  JA literature. The third week (June 18-22) will be used to research and decide on paper topics and students will spend the last week (June 25-29) writing their final papers.

Since this will be a very personalised project, the number of participants is limited to 10.

Prerequisites

The usual (mathematical maturity).

Assessment

To pass, students must hand in a short homework exercise for each lecture in the first week (these will not be formally graded), give one in class presentation and attend the other students' presentations in the second week, and hand in a passing final paper. This final paper can be a novel idea you come up with during the course, or an analysis of an existing paper.

References

 

Ulle Endriss. Judgment Aggregation. In F. Brandt, V. Conitzer, U. Endriss, J. Lang, and A. D. Procaccia, editors, Handbook of Computational Social Choice, Cambridge University Press, 2016.

More material will be provided in the first lecture of the course.