Mind The Gap꞉ Fair Division With Separation

23 Nov 2022 - Warut Suksompong, Assistant Professor, School of Computing

Mind the Gap: Fair Division with Separation

Abstract

The fair allocation of limited resources is a fundamental problem in society. While the problem of fair division has been studied by economists for several decades, thanks in part to computer scientists, this area is perhaps more active currently than ever before. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss my work on fair division with separation constraints, such as those arising from social distancing guidelines. Although it is sometimes impossible to allocate a proportional share to every agent under a separation requirement, we show that for a one-dimensional resource (such as space along a street), the criterion of maximin share fairness can always be attained. We also consider more complex resources, including two-dimensional resources (such as land) and graphical resources (such as road networks), and show that even though maximin share fairness itself may be too demanding, an ordinal relaxation of it can provide meaningful guarantees. This part is based on joint work with Edith Elkind and Erel Segal-Halevi.
In the second part, I will provide some samples of my recent and ongoing research, which connects fair division with areas ranging from combinatorics to differential privacy. I will also discuss my work on fairness in voting and participatory budgeting settings.

Biodata

Warut Suksompong is a NUS Presidential Young Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. He completed his PhD at Stanford University and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. His research interests include algorithmic game theory, mechanism design, social choice theory, and other problems at the interface between computer science, economics, mathematics, and operations research. He has received a Distinguished Paper Award at IJCAI 2021 and the Best Student Paper Award at WINE 2021, published surveys at IJCAI 2021 and in the ACM SIGecom Exchanges, and presented tutorials at IJCAI 2019 and 2022.