Democracy + Computer Science = Better Collective Decision-Making

In all levels of society, heterogeneous groups of people must make collective decisions on behalf of the entire group. One approach for making such decisions is through democracy, which entails allowing everyone in the group to express their opinion over what the decision should be and then aggregating all preferences in order to make a choice. This talk will discuss how tools from computer science can help analyze and design collective decision-making procedures and democratic paradigms with a particular focus on liquid democracy and participatory budgeting. 

Anson Kahng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Goergen Institute of Data Science at the University of Rochester. His research focuses on theoretical problems at the intersection of computer science and economics, particularly in computational social choice, which focuses on designing and evaluating methods of aggregating individual preferences to make collective decisions. Recently, he has focused on problems at the intersection of computer science and democracy. He is also always excited to work on new interdisciplinary collaborations!