Advanced Design and Analysis of Algorithms: COMPSCI 720 Semester 1, City Campus

Welcome to the course for 2012. This year will cover a new topic: Computational Social Choice. This course is aimed at graduate level students as preparation for research work in this area. It is also useful for students intending to work in the general area of theoretical computer science, and to students from other departments with good mathematical preparation.

Computational Social Choice is a very active research area at the boundary of economics and computer science. It is closely related to Algorithmic Game Theory, which tends to deal more with issues involving money. Computational Social Choice deals with situations involving collective decision-making where money is not a major factor. We will cover basic topics from classical social choice such as voting, fair division, judgement aggregation, and coalition formation. These have been studied for a long time in political science and economics. Recently the rise of "internet-based everything" and of multiagent systems in AI has led to new applications, interesting new questions being raised, and a reexamination of the foundations of these subjects from a computational viewpoint.

All materials for the course will be distributed via Cecil. To get an idea of whether the course sounds interesting, please talk to Mark Wilson.

Four assignments (probably all written, with perhaps some programming): 40%

Final exam: 60%