Computable Rationality, NUTS, and the Nuclear Leviathan

This paper explores how the Leviathan that projects power through nuclear arms exercises a unique nuclearized sovereignty. In the case of nuclear superpowers, this sovereignty extends to wielding the power to destroy human civilization as we know it across the globe. Nuclearized sovereignty depends on a hybrid form of power encompassing human decision-makers in a hierarchical chain of command, and all of the technical and computerized functions necessary to maintain command and control at every moment of the sovereign's existence: this sovereign power cannot sleep. This article analyzes how the form of rationality that informs this hybrid exercise of power historically developed to be computable. By definition, computable rationality must be able to function without any intelligible grasp of the context or the comprehensive significance of decision-making outcomes. Thus, maintaining nuclearized sovereignty necessarily must be able to execute momentous life and death decisions without the type of sentience we usually associate with ethical individual and collective decisions

ILR Faculty Publications 2005-06

The production of scholarly research continues to be one of the primary missions of the ILR School. During a typical academic year, ILR faculty members published or had accepted for publication over 25 books, edited volumes, and monographs, 170 articles and chapters in edited volumes, numerous book reviews. In addition, a large number of manuscripts were submitted for publication, presented at professional association meetings, or circulated in working paper form. Our faculty's research continues to find its way into the very best industrial relations, social science and statistics journals.Faculty_Publications_2005_06.pdf: 38 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

The Web Science Observatory

To understand and enable the evolution of the Web and to help address grand societal challenges, the Web must be observable at scale across space and time. That requires a globally distributed and collaborative Web Observatory

Detecting Possible Manipulators in Elections

Manipulation is a problem of fundamental importance in the context of voting in which the voters exercise their votes strategically instead of voting honestly to prevent selection of an alternative that is less preferred. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem shows that there is no strategy-proof voting rule that simultaneously satisfies certain combinations of desirable properties. Researchers have attempted to get around the impossibility results in several ways such as domain restriction and computational hardness of manipulation. However these approaches have been shown to have limitations. Since prevention of manipulation seems to be elusive, an interesting research direction therefore is detection of manipulation. Motivated by this, we initiate the study of detection of possible manipulators in an election. We formulate two pertinent computational problems - Coalitional Possible Manipulators (CPM) and Coalitional Possible Manipulators given Winner (CPMW), where a suspect group of voters is provided as input to compute whether they can be a potential coalition of possible manipulators. In the absence of any suspect group, we formulate two more computational problems namely Coalitional Possible Manipulators Search (CPMS), and Coalitional Possible Manipulators Search given Winner (CPMSW). We provide polynomial time algorithms for these problems, for several popular voting rules. For a few other voting rules, we show that these problems are in NP-complete. We observe that detecting manipulation maybe easy even when manipulation is hard, as seen for example, in the case of the Borda voting rule.Comment: Accepted in AAMAS 201