Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Australia's ecosystem in market design has been growing and shining in multiple places.  Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Melbourne University's Centre for Market Design (cmd.org.au) and also revisit the UTS Centre for Policy and Market Design in Sydney (https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/centre-policy-and-market-design). It was great to meet so many researchers working interesting topics in Melbourne. Similarly, the UTS center that originally started in 2015 is in full swing and in the capable hands of the Isa Hafalir who moved recently to UTS from CMU. Of course, much closer to home, we have teams at UNSW and Data61 working on market design including ADT, CSIRO digital productivity, and the AGORA market design center at UNSW.

There has been fascinating new progress on the problem of fair cake cutting. A notable new result is the first bounded envy-free protocol for "chore division "!  The problem concerns "cake" that no one is willing to have. Chore division has also been called the "salty cake" problem. The new protocol was developed by a group of researchers (Sina Dehghani, Alireza Farhadi, MohammadTaghi HajiAghayi, and Hadi Yami) from U of Maryland. The paper was presented at SODA 2018 recently.

Maurice Salles has penned a detailed and positive review of the Handbook of Computational Social Choice : https://journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/2818 He concluding comments are: " As a final comment, let me say that this  Handbook  is a most remarkable volume. I was unable to detect defects or weaknesses. All chapters are well written, with an obvious objective regarding readership. Introduction sections are clear. The authors are capable of transmitting their knowledge, whatever the difficulty. I can only repeat myself by saying that it is highly recommended to all social scientists and all computer scientists interested in voting and in social choice in general. "

Here is a plug for a popular science article written by Barton Lee and I. The article discusses a new multi-winner or committee voting rule that we feel is quite a reasonable solution for finding representative committees. 

Richard Thaler, Chicago Professor and the 2017 recipient of the Nobel prize in economics on his ideas in behavioural economics:

It's a probably a good sign for researchers in the Econ-CS interface that tailor made Econ-CS degree programs are forming. Some news from MIT: http://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-creates-new-major-computer-science-economics-data-science-0904