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Philosophical and computational aspects of voting
IRB 2207 or Zoom: https://umd.zoom.us/j/96974683952?pwd=UjJhQ1ZCZlgzdEFyM2M0RnE1L2pkZz09
Thursday, November 16, 2023, 2:00-3:15 pm Calendar
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Abstract

An important aspect of AI ethics and safety is aligning an AI system's behavior with the preferences (and values) of its owners, users and people affected by its actions.  But often the preferences of a group of people are diverse and not aligned themselves. Voting theory provides many different methods that aggregate the preferences of a group of people.  In the first part of the talk, I will survey  different voting methods highlighting their benefits and costs using examples from recent elections.  The second part of the talk will address a central issue is social choice theory and mechanism design: the manipulability of voting methods. Classic results show that any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference  instead of their true preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to such manipulation has become a key consideration in the literature on comparing voting methods. In computational social choice, one standard measure of resistance to manipulation is the worst-case computational complexity of computing whether there is some ballot that will elect a desired candidate. I will report on a recent paper in which we take a different approach, measuring resistance to manipulation by whether neural networks of varying sizes can learn to profitably manipulate a given voting method in expectation, given different types of information about how other voters will vote.

Bio

Eric Pacuit is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. Prior to coming to Maryland, Eric did his graduate work at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam and in the Departments of Philosophy and Computer Science at Stanford University. Eric’s primary research interests are in logic (especially modal logic), game theory, social choice theory, and formal and social epistemology. His research has been funded by the Natural Science Foundation and a Vidi grant from the Dutch science foundation (NWO).

This talk is organized by Emily Dacquisto