This event is part of the AI for Social Impact Seminar Series hosted by Penn State's Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
“Just, Equitable, and Efficient Algorithmic Allocation of Scarce Societal Resources”
Demand for resources that are collectively controlled or regulated by society, like social services or organs for transplantation, typically far outstrips supply. How should these scarce resources be allocated? Any approach to this question requires insights from computer science, economics, and beyond; we must define objectives (foregrounding equity and distributive justice in addition to efficiency), predict outcomes (taking causal considerations into account), and optimize allocations, while carefully considering agent preferences and incentives. Motivated by the real-world problem of provision of services to homeless households, I will discuss our approach to thinking through how algorithmic approaches and computational thinking can help.
About the Speaker
Sanmay Das is a Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University. His research interests are in designing effective algorithms for agents in complex, uncertain environments, and in understanding the social or collective outcomes of individual behavior. Dr. Das is chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence, a member of the board of directors of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and serves as an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation and of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. Dr. Das has served as program co-chair of the AAMAS and AMMA conferences, in addition to regularly serving as an area chair or senior program committee member of major conferences including IJCAI, AAAI, EC, and AAMAS. He has been recognized with awards for research and teaching, including an NSF CAREER Award and the Department Chair Award for Outstanding Teaching at Washington University.