Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award

The Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award is given for dissertations in the field of autonomous agents and multiagent systems that show originality, depth, impact, as well as quality of writing, supported by high-quality publications. 

The 2024 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award committee (Nisarg Shah (Chair); Gauthier Picard; Long Tran-Thanh; and Bryan Wilder) has recommended the following recipients for the 2024 awards (winner and runner-up).

Winner

Jannik Peters
Thesis title: Facets of Proportionality: Selecting Committees, Budgets, and Clusters
Supervisor: Dr. Markus Brill
University: TU Berlin

Runner-Up

Lily Xu
Thesis title: High-stakes decisions from low-quality data: AI decision-making for planetary health
Supervisor: Prof. Milind Tambe
University: Harvard University

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Invited talk

Jannik Peters

TITLE: Facets of Proportionality: Selecting Committees, Budgets, and Clusters

DATE & TIME: Wednesday, May 21, 4:30PM – 5:30PM

LOCATION: Ambassador Ballroom Salons 1+2, 3rd Floor

CHAIR: Paolo Turrini

ABSTRACT: Proportionality is a key concept in computational social choice: if we make a collective decision, this decision should reflect every group of agents taking part in the decision-making proportionally. But what does “proportionally” mean exactly? How can we define it and which definitions are meaningful? I will try to answer these questions by giving an overview of my thesis dealing with proportionality in the contexts of multiwinner voting, participatory budgeting, and clustering.

BIO: Jannik Peters is a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the TU Berlin advised by Markus Brill and M.Sc and B.Sc degrees from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. His research deals with issues in computational social choice and voting theory, in particular with the theory of proportional representation and fairness.