Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

For those attending IJCAI 2011 (in Barcelona) AND also looking forward to exploring the city, The Guardian is focussing on Barcelona on their city guide website. Enjoy!

A while ago, the The innovations in Algorithmic Game Theory workshop was advertized. Considering the excellent speaker list, I was hopeful that the videos of the lectures would be put online. The good news is that the lectures were videotaped and are online! Please click on the following links: http://iasmac31.as.huji.ac.il: 8080/groups/ innovationsinalgorithmicgameth eory/blog/ http://iasmac31.as.huji.ac.il: 8080/groups/ innovationsinalgorithmicgameth eory/blog/?startIndex=20 The server is really slow but the videos should work. [Hat tip to Paul Goldberg for pointing out the video links]

A lot has been said about the pros and cons of using AV (Single Transferable Voting) as compared to First Past the Post ( Plurality ) in TV debates etc. What has been perplexing is that the opinions of specialists have hardly been sought. Or perhaps their voice got drowned amidst the political manouvering and lobbying. Although the AV issue is dead for now , I wanted to highlight what the experts have to say about Plurality, the most widely used voting method, also in use in the UK elections: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/expertcomment/av/ The relevant portion is from 10.00 onwards where Prof. Dennis Leech, a specialist on voting theory (also one of my PhD advisors) talks about the issue. Prof. Leech refers to a meeting by the most renowned social choice theorists where Plurality was dismissed as a reasonable voting method . This is of course not the first time, people have voiced concern over Plurality .

(Hat tip to Simina Branzei for the link).

I recently noticed an interesting blog on game theory and social choice managed by László Á. Kóczy whose interests include 'cooperative game theory, voting games, as well as in scientometrics and industrial organisation.' Kóczy also manages the Ideas archive on game theory .

As requested by the SAGT organizers : a reminder about the approaching deadline for paper submissions ( May 9, 2011, 23:59 GMT ). The call for papers is available from here .

Josh Tenenbaum (Professor at MIT) researches on cognitive and neural mechanisms of the human mind and how can we use similar principles in AI. Recently, Tenenbaum and his coauthors have written an article in Science titled ' How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction '.  Here is a short talk Tenenbaum gave at Davos 2010 on the topic.