Social Choice: Theory and Practice

The aim of the workshop is to bring together a diverse research community from social choice theory, social sciences, and psychology on one side, and mathematics, statistics, decision and information theory on the other side. These fields traditionally have little interaction, despite the fact that a number of relevant practical problems in social sciences may be successfully addressed using techniques and tools developed in signal processing and information theory.

The organizers plan to create a forum for studying traditional and emerging experimental and computational problems in social choice theory through a multifaceted analytical lens.

The topics of interest include social decision making mechanisms, voting protocols and vote aggregation, voting and voter influence over social networks, and opinion dynamics modeling and monitoring. These topics lie at the heart of modern psychology, political sciences and sociology, and in addition, they have emerged in various incarnations in Internet applications, recommender systems and computer science in general.

The targeted group of participants will be selected experts in the field of social choice theory, decision theory, cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, information theory and statistics.