Advanced Optimization for Social Choice

The heart of combinatorial optimization and operations research is to develop general techniques useful for obtaining fast algorithms in many fields. This is impossible without a rich and lively interaction with those fields: learning about their key computational problems, translating them into the language of combinatorial optimization to be able to apply existing techniques, and developing new ones, motivated by the discovered challenges. Computational social choice encompasses timely topics such as voting, manipulation, matching with preferences, fair division, and many others. Several recent papers have reaped great rewards by applying advanced optimization techniques to computational social choice and have also motivated new research in optimization through translating computational social choice questions to the language of optimization.

However, a wealth of combinatorial optimization techniques remains unknown or unused in the computational social choice community, and, conversely, computational social choice topics remain relatively unknown in the optimization community. Indeed, there is great potential in developing the interface of these two fields. Thus, the main goal of the workshop is to accelerate this symbiotic process that enriches both fields by connecting their experts, presenting the state-of-the-art in an accessible way, and identifying key open problems that will drive future research.