IMD Affiliate Presents the Annual Heard Lecture on Computational Social Choice at Wellesley’s Mathematics Department

The annual Martha Davenport Heard Lecture will take place on February 15th, 2024, at Wellesley’s Mathematics Department. The speaker of this year is Prof. Moon Duchin, an affiliate of the Institute of Mathematics and Democracy. Her talk is titled “A Tour of Computational Social Choice.”

Prof. Duchin is a Professor of Mathematics and the John Dibiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. She is a founder of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group as well as the interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts. Prof. Duchin is renowned for her pioneering work that brings computational and data science tools into the study of gerrymandering and has since extended her expertise into other areas of the science of democracy. Prof. Duchin has served as an expert witness in many high-profile gerrymandering cases and has helped other mathematicians become engaged in this work. Among other honors, she is a recipient of a Radcliffe Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Here is the abstract of her talk: The mathematical study of group decisions has existed for thousands of years in some form or another, and got unified under the name of “social choice theory” in the 1950s.  But since the 1990s or so, computing has been changing the subject.  I’ll overview some of the field of computational social choice, and will make the case for some new directions that are directly relevant to the care and feeding of democracy.