26 research outputs found
An Empirical Study of the Manipulability of Single Transferable Voting
Voting is a simple mechanism to combine together the preferences of multiple
agents. Agents may try to manipulate the result of voting by mis-reporting
their preferences. One barrier that might exist to such manipulation is
computational complexity. In particular, it has been shown that it is NP-hard
to compute how to manipulate a number of different voting rules. However,
NP-hardness only bounds the worst-case complexity. Recent theoretical results
suggest that manipulation may often be easy in practice. In this paper, we
study empirically the manipulability of single transferable voting (STV) to
determine if computational complexity is really a barrier to manipulation. STV
was one of the first voting rules shown to be NP-hard. It also appears one of
the harder voting rules to manipulate. We sample a number of distributions of
votes including uniform and real world elections. In almost every election in
our experiments, it was easy to compute how a single agent could manipulate the
election or to prove that manipulation by a single agent was impossible.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 19th European Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2010
Complexity of and Algorithms for Borda Manipulation
We prove that it is NP-hard for a coalition of two manipulators to compute
how to manipulate the Borda voting rule. This resolves one of the last open
problems in the computational complexity of manipulating common voting rules.
Because of this NP-hardness, we treat computing a manipulation as an
approximation problem where we try to minimize the number of manipulators.
Based on ideas from bin packing and multiprocessor scheduling, we propose two
new approximation methods to compute manipulations of the Borda rule.
Experiments show that these methods significantly outperform the previous best
known %existing approximation method. We are able to find optimal manipulations
in almost all the randomly generated elections tested. Our results suggest
that, whilst computing a manipulation of the Borda rule by a coalition is
NP-hard, computational complexity may provide only a weak barrier against
manipulation in practice
Allocation in Practice
How do we allocate scarcere sources? How do we fairly allocate costs? These
are two pressing challenges facing society today. I discuss two recent projects
at NICTA concerning resource and cost allocation. In the first, we have been
working with FoodBank Local, a social startup working in collaboration with
food bank charities around the world to optimise the logistics of collecting
and distributing donated food. Before we can distribute this food, we must
decide how to allocate it to different charities and food kitchens. This gives
rise to a fair division problem with several new dimensions, rarely considered
in the literature. In the second, we have been looking at cost allocation
within the distribution network of a large multinational company. This also has
several new dimensions rarely considered in the literature.Comment: To appear in Proc. of 37th edition of the German Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (KI 2014), Springer LNC
Élection d'un chemin dans un réseau : étude de la manipulabilité
International audienceInternet est devenu un écosystème économique où interviennent de nombreux acteurs concurrents. Pour les décisions faisant intervenir plusieurs acteurs, il faut un mécanisme équitable qui évite si possible la manipulation du processus de prise de décision par certains. Dans cet article, nous illustrons comment les systèmes de vote peuvent être appliqués sur le cas du choix d'un chemin dans le réseau qui fait intervenir plusieurs opérateurs, et nous montrons que le choix du système de vote a un fort impact sur la manipulabilité du résultat et l'efficacité globale du processus de décision. Une version étendue de cet article a été publiée à ICQT 2013
Designing a Multiagent System for Course-Offering Determination
I attended a doctoral symposium of the conference. It was very good to know about how to guide PhD students to conduct high-quality research and complete PhD program.
I attended all the keynote sessions of the conference. The presentation on Computational Disaster Management by Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck was very insightful and encouraging. The talk on “Agents might not be people” by Professor Nigel Gilbert was illuminating.
The talk on “Satisfiability to Linear Algebra” by Professor Fangzhen Lin was revealing.
I attended almost all sections of PRIMA 2013 and some presentations of AI 2013. They reflect the advancement of the field. The discussions with the people on-site were very interesting and helpful to my future research.
Also, it was great to talk to active researchers in the field and exchanged ideas of our research and explored the possibility of collaboration.This paper describes the design of a multiagent system that facilitates course-offering decision making for a program in an institution. We first model course offering determination for upcoming semester as a multi-winner election with exogenous constraints which is a problem for computational social choice in multiagent systems, which has rarely been considered. Then, the paper describes the architecture and models of the multiagent system for course offering determination with Gaia role model methodology, TROPOS strategic actor diagram, Agent Unified Modeling Language (AUML) sequence diagram for a multi-agent negotiation interaction protocol, and Pseudo-code algorithms for generating fractional votes and course election protocol. A novel course selection preference model for students has been proposed and described formally. The effectiveness of the approach and the implemented system has been showed with the initial experimental results