ComSoC abroad: Summer research visits of Hanna Kern & Felicia Schmidt

Hanna Kern visits the University of Warsaw

From 30 June to 29 August, I (Hanna Kern) had the pleasure of visiting Piotr Skowron at the University of Warsaw. There he is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics.  His research interests lie in the field of computational social choice, in particular committee elections and participatory budgeting.

During my visit we started working together on a project, furthering work from the paper Proportionality in Thumbs Up and Down Voting. We were interested in considering fairness in the setting where voters voice their likes as well as dislikes and made progress adapting priceability to this setting and showing some initial results!

During my stay, the team was incredibly welcoming, and we often got lunch together:

I want to thank them again for being so welcoming, it was very nice to get to know more people in the computational social choice community and to begin this collaboration.

Felicia Schmidt visits MIT

From July 1 to September 10 I had the pleasure to continue our work with Bailey Flanigan directly at her new position at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). Bailey is now an assistant professor at LIDS working with both the computer science and political science departments on preference elicitation and the design of democratic processes.

We have been working together on defining a notion of cost bias in participatory budgeting and thoroughly studying that notion since her initial visit to Semsys in February. This research visit now provided the perfect opportunity to really go in-depth into all of the ideas we had developed over the spring.

I want to, again, thank Bailey and everyone at MIT and at the WU who made these few months possible!