[fvc-wat-disc] Lecture at UofW: "Deciding Elections with Ignorant Voters", Tuesday 22 July 2014 at 11:30am

[Bob Jonkman]

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Hi all: Fair voters with a bent for the ironic may enjoy a lecture at
the University of Waterloo on Tuesday, 22 July 2014 at 11:30am:

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~wnotice/notice_prgms/wreg/list_full.pl?20140622-1130.11682

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Tuesday, 22 July 2014 at 11:30AM
DC 2306C (AI Lab)

Deciding Elections with Ignorant Voters: Social Choice, Imputation, and
Partial Preferences

John Doucette
PhD candidate, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo

    Elections with more than two candidates can be decided on the basis
of ranked ballots, which require voters to specify a total ordering over
the candidates. Systems for deciding elections with ranked ballots have
many nice properties, but also place a much greater cognitive load on
the electorate, since they need quadratically more information to
accurately differentiate all the alternatives. Little attention has been
paid to the problem of deciding the outcome in a principled way when the
electorate is ignorant, and cannot specify a total ordering because they
lack sufficient information. This seminar will discuss the existing
systems at a high level, and present a new approach to deciding these
elections using machine learning. I will present some validation of the
approach, as well as a theoretical framework for analysing the impact of
using different machine learning techniques and voting systems in
consort. I will also elicit feedback on the most promising research
avenues related to this topic, and on alternative approaches or data
sources. The seminar will not assume significant background in voting
theory or machine learning.

Talk sponsored by: School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo

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