Bringing Harmony Through AI and Economics

  • Nisarg Shah, Carnegie Mellon University; Robert Schapire, Microsoft

The alliance between AI and economics is making an ever-growing societal impact. I will focus on an emerging theme in this space: developing computer programs that help groups of people make harmonious everyday decisions. I will illustrate this theme through my research in computational social choice and computational fair division. In both areas, I will make a special effort to demonstrate how fundamental theoretical questions underlie the design and implementation of deployed services that are already used by tens of thousands of people (spliddit.org), as well as upcoming services (robovote.org).

Speaker Details

Nisarg Shah is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Ariel Procaccia. His broad research agenda in algorithmic economics includes topics such as computational social choice, fair division, game theory (both cooperative and noncooperative), and prediction markets. He focuses on designing theoretically grounded methods that have practical implications. Shah is the winner of the 2013-2014 Hima and Jive Graduate Fellowship and the 2014-2015 Facebook Fellowship.