COMSOC-2006 in Amsterdam

Ulle Endriss
ILLC, University of Amsterdam

Computational social choice is a new discipline emerging at the interface of social choice theory and computer science. It is concerned with the application of computational techniques to the study of social choice mechanisms, and with the integration of social choice paradigms into computing.

The 1st International Workshop on Computational Social Choice (COMSOC-2006) was hosted on 6-8 December 2006 by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam. The workshop, which was sponsored by the NWO, the ILLC, the BRICKS project, and the BNVKI, has been attended by 80 participants from around the world: Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The aim of organising COMSOC-2006 had been to bring together different communities: computer scientists interested in computational issues in social choice; people working in artificial intelligence and multiagent systems who are using ideas from social choice to organise societies of artificial software agents; logicians interested in the logic-based specification and analysis of social procedures (social software); and last but not least people coming from social choice theory itself. And indeed, members of all these communities attended the workshop and presented their work. 

The COMSOC-2006 programme consisted of five invited talks and the presentation of 38 contributed papers, which had been selected from amongst the 48 submissions received by the programme committee. Topics covered included, amongst others, complexity-theoretic studies of voting rules; computational barriers to strategic behaviour; resource allocation and fair division; negotiation in multiagent systems; preference elicitation; ranking systems; logics for social choice; computational issues in coalition formation; mechanism design; and the study of social choice phenomena by means of simulation.

The invited talks were given by Francesca Rossi (Padova), Harrie de Swart (Tilburg), Noam Nisan (Jerusalem), Steven Brams (New York), and Boi Faltings (Lausanne). In the morning of the first day, Francesca Rossi presented recent work of her group on preference aggregation in the presence of incomparabe alternatives as well as uncertainty about the actual ordering of alternatives. In the afternoon, Harrie de Swart discussed an interdisciplinary approach to coalition formation and reported on the use of various software tools for computing stable governments. 

The second workshop day started with the invited talk by Noam Nisan, who gave an introduction the field of algorithmic mechanism design. In particular, the talk provided an overview of results relating degrees of incentive compatibility and the efficiency of approximation schemes for solving multi-unit auctions. In the afternoon, Steven Brams spoke on fair division and discussed different procedures for dividing a cake amongst several people in ways that are both fair and efficient. On the final day, Boi Faltings discussed possibilities for achieving budget balance for social choice mechanisms, without creating incentives for manipulation amongst the agents involved. 

The workshop proceedings are available from the COMSOC-2006 website: http://www.illc.uva.nl/~ulle/COMSOC-2006/. A follow-up event is planned for 2008.