IJCAI 2018 tutorial: Computational Social Choice and Moral Artificial Intelligence


Location and time:
Room K21, 14:00-15:30 (first part on computational social choice) and 16:00-18:00 (second part on moral AI). It should be possible to follow the second part without having been there for the first, but it will certainly help to have been there for the first.

Brief description:
Social choice is the theory of how to make decisions based on the preferences of multiple agents. Computational social choice is by now a well-established research area in multiagent systems, but more recently has also started to be applied to some of the thorniest problems regarding the societal impact of AI. How should AI make decisions with a moral component, when human beings cannot agree on what the right decisions are?

Outline:
In the first part of this tutorial, I will give an introduction to computational social choice (no previous background required). I will focus primarily on voting, but will also discuss related settings, in particular judgment aggregation.

In the second part, I will discuss some problems in AI with a moral component. How should a self-driving car trade off risks between its occupants and others on the road? How (if at all) should we prioritize patients for the purpose of receiving an organ in a kidney exchange? I will discuss how techniques from computational social choice might be applied to these problems.

Slides:
Part I: ppt, pdf.
Part II: pptx, pdf.

Speaker bio:
Vincent Conitzer is the Kimberly J. Jenkins University Professor of New Technologies and Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He received Ph.D. (2006) and M.S. (2003) degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and an A.B. (2001) degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Most of his research is on artificial intelligence (especially multiagent systems) and economic theory (especially game theory, social choice, and mechanism design). Conitzer has received the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, an NSF CAREER award, the inaugural Victor Lesser dissertation award, an honorable mention for the ACM dissertation award, and several awards for papers and service at the AAAI and AAMAS conferences. He has also been named a Guggenheim Fellow, a Kavli Fellow, a Bass Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and one of AI's Ten to Watch. Conitzer and Preston McAfee were the founding Editors-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC).