Algorithms for Sustainable Group Decision Making
funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant P31890
Contents
Goal of the Project
Group decision making (GDM) is a central activity of human interaction, and also an increasingly important issue in computer science with applications such as multi-agent systems, preference aggregation in artificial intelligence, e-democracy platforms, and group recommender systems. This research project is situated in the field of computational social choice (COMSOC), which is concerned with the study of GDM from a computational point of view. The main focus of this project lies on sustainable, long-term, algorithm-supported GDM within small or medium-sized groups that decide about a varying range of topics.
Instead of considering decisions as singular events, we want to take the history of past group decisions into account. This novel viewpoint allows us to tackle a fundamental issue of GDM: how to avoid situations where frustrated participants drop out of the decision making process. For example, if a minority has been repeatedly overruled in the past, it might withdraw from the decision process. To overcome this problem, we will introduce and analyze perpetual voting rules: these are voting rules that take the history of previous decisions into account and guarantee fairness across this history.
The overall goal of this project is to find GDM algorithms that foster participation and make the GDM process long-term sustainable. To achieve this goal, we will use a large array of methods established in computational social choice. The outcome of this project contributes to a future in which GDM apps and e-democracy systems have "COMSOC inside", and hence make use of the theoretical and experimental expertise established in this field. The perspectives of the proposed research—long-term GDM, compromise, and reduced information requirements—are essential ingredients for sustaining GDM processes.
Project Team
Former project staff
- Jan Maly (postdoc researcher)
- Stefan Forster (student assistant)
- Benjamin Krenn (student assistant)
Project partners
- Edith Elkind University of Oxford
- Piotr Faliszewski AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow
- Paul Harrenstein University of Oxford
- Rolf Niedermeier TU Berlin
- Piotr Skowron University of Warsaw
News
New book: Multi-Winner Voting with Approval Preferences
2022-12-01
The book "Multi-Winner Voting with Approval Preferences" by Martin Lackner and Piotr Skowron has been published. It is an open access book and can be downloaded freely from Springer press.
The book includes an overview of major approval-based committee voting rules, an axiomatic analysis of these rules, a special focus on proportionality, algorithmic issues and related formalisms. We believe it can be helpful for both researchers entering the field as well as multi-winner veterans for looking up references.
Jan Maly receives price for his dissertation
2021-09-24
We congratulate Jan for the “Dissertationspreis der Stadt Wien”, an annual award by the city council of Vienna. Details see here.
Jan Maly receives Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship
2021-09-01Jan Maly recently received a prestigious Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship. This fellowship will fund his research for the next 2.5 years. He will spend most of the time at the University of Amsterdam, working with Ulle Endriss and his team.
First Vienna Workshop in Computational Social Choice
2020-09-25PI Martin Lackner and team member Jan Maly co-organized the First Vienna Workshop in Computational Social Choice, with talks form Christian Klamler, Martin Lackner, Jérôme Lang, Jiehua Chen and Thekla Hamm.
For more information see the website of the workshop.
Jan Maly successfully defends his PhD thesis!
2020-09-24
We congratulate Jan to the successful defense of his PhD thesis Ranking Sets of Objects – How to Deal with Impossibility Results. Well done, Dr. Maly! :-)
The thesis was reviewed by Ulle Endriss (University of Amsterdam) and Jérôme Lang (CNRS, Paris), who formed the thesis committee together with Christian Klamler (Universität Graz) as national reviewer.
AAAI 2020: Three Accepted papers
2019-12-20
We are delighted to announce that three papers by team members have been accepted for presentation at the AAAI 2020 conference in New York.
Team members Martin Lackner and Jan Maly were able to attend the conference and present their work in oral presentations.
New members joined the team
2019-12-1Jan Maly and Benjamin Krenn joined the project. Welcome!
The project "Algorithms for Sustainable Group Decision Making" started
2019-2-1The project "Algorithms for Sustainable Group Decision Making" started in Feburary 2019. Its projected duration is 3 years and 3 months.
Publications
Here, we provide a comprehensive list of all project publications.2023
- Proportional Decisions in Perpetual Voting In Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023), AAAI Press, 2023.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Proportionality in Approval-Based Participatory Budgeting In Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023), AAAI Press, 2023.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Fairness in Participatory Budgeting via Equality of Resources In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2023), IFAAMAS, 2023.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Free-Riding in Multi-Issue Decisions In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2023), IFAAMAS, 2023.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Phragmén's Voting Methods and Justified Representation In Mathematical Programming, 2023.
[ BibTeX | doi ] - abcvoting: A Python package for approval-based multi-winner voting rules In Journal of Open Source Software, 8 (81): 4880, 2023.
[ BibTeX | doi ] - Multi-Winner Voting with Approval Preferences Springer International Publishing, SpringerBriefs in Intelligent Systems , 2023.
[ BibTeX | www ]
2022
- Liquid Democracy with Ranked Delegations In Proceedings of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2022), pages 4884-4891, AAAI Press, 2022.
[ BibTeX ] - Participatory Budgeting with Donations and Diversity Constraints In Proceedings of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2022), pages 9323-9330, AAAI Press, 2022.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - How to Sample Approval Elections? In Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2022), pages 496-502, ijcai.org, 2022.
[ BibTeX ] - Ranking Sets of Objects: The Complexity of Avoiding Impossibility Results In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 73: 1-65, 2022.
[ BibTeX | doi ]
2021
- Perpetual Voting: The Axiomatic Lens In The Eighth International Workshop on Computational Social Choice (COMSOC-2021), 2021.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Choice Logics and Their Computational Properties In Proceedings of the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021), pages 1794-1800, ijcai.org, 2021.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Approval-Based Shortlisting In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2021), pages 737-745, ACM, 2021.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Fairness in Long-Term Participatory Budgeting In Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021), pages 299-305, ijcai.org, 2021.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Fairness in Long-Term Participatory Budgeting (Extended Abstract) In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2021), pages 1566-1568, IFAAMAS, 2021.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Consistent Approval-Based Multi-Winner Rules In Journal of Economic Theory, 192: 105173, 2021.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Ranking Sets of Defeasible Elements in Preferential Approaches to Structured Argumentation: Postulates, Relations, and Characterizations In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021), pages 6435-6443, AAAI Press, 2021.
[ BibTeX | pdf ]
2020
- A Mathematical Analysis of an Election System Proposed by Gottlob Frege In Erkenntnis, 2020.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Encoding Choice Logics in ASP In ASPOCP 2020, Ceur-WS, 2020.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Utilitarian Welfare and Representation Guarantees of Approval-Based Multiwinner Rules In Artificial Intelligence, 288: 103366, 2020.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Preferences Single-Peaked on a Circle In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 68: 463-502, 2020.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Incomplete Preferences in Single-Peaked Electorates In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 67: 797-833, 2020.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Strategic Campaign Management in Apportionment Elections In Proceedings of the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2020), ijcai.org, 2020.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Perpetual Voting: Fairness in Long-Term Decision Making In Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020), AAAI Press, 2020.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Proportional Belief Merging In Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020), AAAI Press, 2020.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Lifting Preferences over Alternatives to Preferences over Sets of Alternatives: The Complexity of Recognizing Desirable Families of Sets In Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020), AAAI Press, 2020.
[ BibTeX | pdf ]
2019
- A Quantitative Analysis of Multi-Winner Rules In Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2019), ijcai.org, 2019.
[ BibTeX | pdf ] - Aggregating Expert Opinions in Support of Medical Diagnostic Decision-Making In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KR4HC-2019), 2019.
[ BibTeX | pdf ]
Tools, Code and Data
- abcvoting: implementations of approval-based committee (multi-winner) rules
- perpetual: implementations of several perpetual voting rules (see my paper "Perpetual Voting: Fairness in Long-Term Decision Making")
- frege: an implementation of Frege's voting method (see "A Mathematical Analysis of an Election System Proposed by Gottlob Frege")
- apportionment: implementations of common apportionment methods
- Temporal Preference Data Collection: a collection of preference data over periods of time
Last updated: 2023-03-14 13:57