Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

The Handbook on Market Design edited by Nir Vulkan, Alvin E. Roth, and Zvika Neeman is about to be published by Cambridge University Press. The book has major sections on matching markets and auctions. Alvin E. Roth, Nir Vulkan, and Zvika Neeman: Introduction Part I: General Principles 1: Alvin E. Roth: What Have We Learned From Market Design? 2: Gary Bolton: Not Up To Standard: Stress Testing Market Designs for Misbehavior 3: Paul Klemperer: Using and Abusing Auction Theory Part II: Cases Section II.A: Matching Markets 4: Tayfun Sönmez and Utku Unver: Market Design for Kidney Exchange 5: Atila Abdulkadiroglu: School Choice 6: Aytek Erdil and Haluk Ergin: Improving Efficiency in School Choice 7: Sarbartha Bandyopadhyay, Fedor Iskhakov, Terence Johnson, Soohyung Lee, David McArthur, John Rust, Joel Watson, and John Watson: Can the Job Market for Economists be Improved? 8: Joshua Gans and Scott Stern: Designing Markets for Ideas 9: Ashok Rai and Tomas Sjöström: Rede...

The latest edition of CACM has an i nteresting article by Ariel Procaccia on the problem of cutting a cake. The problem captures settings where a heterogeneous divisible goods needs to be divided among agents in fair and optimal manner. The article is a a gentle yet up to date overview of the past and recent work on the problem.

AAMAS 2013 : Twelfth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems St Paul 6-10 May 2013 http://aamas2013.cs.umn.edu/ AAMAS was located in St. Paul, USA this year. Toby (Walsh) and I were the two participants from NICTA. The first two days were dedicated to co-located workshops and tutorials. Along with Edith Elkind (NTU Singapore) and Michael Wooldridge (Oxford), I co-organized the fourth edition the International workshop on cooperative aspects of multiagent systems ( CoopMAS ). We had four sessions of interesting talks including an invited talk by Thomasz Michalak in which he discussed the applications of cooperative game theory to gauge the centrality of nodes in a network. On the second day, I attended a number of talks from the workshop of OptMAS (Optimization in Multiagent Systems). The main conference started on the 8th. Among the invited speakers, Barbara J. Grosz (Harvard) and Cristiano Castelfranchi (Inst. of Cognitive Sciences and Technol...

A recent article  titled "Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math" by Harvard Biologist E. O. Wilson has caught a lot of attention. The article is based on a recently published book . A central message of the article is roughly that mathematical grounding is not important for scientists. The same points have also been made in a recent talk by Wilson (especially from 5.35 onwards): Although Wilson makes some valid points in the article as well as in the video, he appears to be overly dismissive about the role of mathematics in formalizing ideas and building models. What also struck me was the subtitle of the article: "E.O. Wilson shares a secret: Discoveries emerge from ideas, not number-crunching".  The subtitle seems to equate mathematics to number-crunching which I found to frankly be ignorant of the fact that mathematicians highly value elegant ideas and beautiful arguments. It was pleasing to see that a psychology professor and computer science pro...