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1111 Engineering Drive, Boulder, CO 80309

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On Incentives and Fairness

Institute of Cognitive Science Distinguished Speaker

ABSTRACT: Automated decisions and policies informed by machine learning and the pursuit of efficiency permeate today's social life.  I will discuss three quite diverse manifestations of this reality, and certain challenging computational problems resulting from them: Classifying selfish agents, for example for college admissions, may lead to game-playing, inefficiency, and unfairness; when the input of machine learning algorithms is provided by profit-making producers of data, novel forms of computational mechanism design are needed; finally, optimizing efficiency in congestion games, for example through tolls in congested routes, can be proved under assumptions to necessarily increase wealth inequality.  We ponder whether these are not symptoms and parts of an emerging new social order.

BIO: Christos H. Papadimitriou is the Donovan Family professor of computer science at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia in 2017, he taught at UC Berkeley for 22 years, and before that at Harvard, MIT, NTU Athens, Stanford, and UCSD. He has written five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, control, AI, robotics, economics and game theory, the Internet, evolution, and more recently the study of the brain. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton as well as eight honorary doctorates, and he has won the Knuth prize, the Goedel prize, and the von Neumann Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering; in 2013 the president of Greece named him Commander of the Order of the Phoenix. He has also written three novels:
"Turing", "Logicomix" and his latest "Independence".

  • Emily Adams

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