VICI grant for Ulle Endriss

Dr. Ulle Endriss has received a Vici grant from the NWO for his research programme on “Collective Information”. Endriss is Associate Professor (UHD) for Logic and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), an interfaculty research institute that belongs to both the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities.

Collective Information

When tallying the votes in a committee of experts, when interpreting the data collected from a large number of participants in a crowdsourcing experiment, or when hoping to compute a meaningful grade for a student in a massively open online course (MOOC) that uses peer assessment, we always face the same daunting task: to aggregate several pieces of information contributed by a number of individuals into a single piece of information that appropriately represents the “wisdom of the crowd”. The ambition of this new research programme is to develop a principled approach for handling such collective information that can be easily instantiated to specific application domains.

Computational Social Choice

Endriss works in an area known as computational social choice. It deals with the design and analysis of mechanisms for collective decision making. Research in computational social choice is inherently interdisciplinary and draws on a wide range of ideas and techniques, originating in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science (multiagent systems, knowledge representation, algorithm design, complexity theory), Economics (decision theory, game theory, social choice theory), and Mathematics (logic, probability theory).

The archetypal problem studied in the field is that of how best to aggregate the preferences of several individuals, for instance, in an election. In this new research programme, Endriss now wants to generalise beyond this classical problem by also considering other types of information, besides preference information.

Research Group

The funds made available by the Vici grant will be used to hire three PhD students, a postdoc, and a programmer to further strengthen the Computational Social Choice Group at the ILLC.