An invited “young researcher” presentation at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)

The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence is an international conference that brings together researchers and practitioners in the field of artificial intelligence. The 31st edition is held from July 23 to 29, in Vienna (Austria). On this occasion,  Umberto Grandi, UT1 lecturer in the AI department – LILaC team, will speak as a young invited researcher, on the topic “Interaction and expressiveness in collective decision-making“.

Summary of the presentation and challenges of research on algorithms for digital democracy

Collective decisions among human and artificial agents can be enhanced by allowing for more interaction among decision-makers and by letting them express more information about their preferences. In this talk I present ongoing research on two settings: iterative voting, which repeatedly applies a voting rule until decision-makers converge to an outcome, and delegative voting on multiple issues.

Research on algorithms for digital democracy is gaining momentum, and the need for new applications in this area is real. The growth of an interdisciplinary community around these topics has the potential to unveil fascinating new problems and research directions for the AI community studying collective decision making. To give an example, in a recent experiment conducted online during the French presidential elections, users were asked to express their opinion and this platform showed the need for new social choice methods capable of handling a large number of alternatives and very incomplete preference data, which suggested to researchers a number of research directions for future work.