Course overview

• Instructor: Lirong Xia (xial@rpi.edu). Please call me Lirong.
• Time: Moday, Thursday 2:00 pm-3:50 pm
• Location: LOW 3045.
• Office hours:
  • by appointment
  • Piazza
• All lecture notes are here. Please login with your RPI Box account after activation, and do not share anything outside this class.

Schedule (subject to change)

Textbook

• (In progress) D. Parkes and S. Seuken. Economics and Computation.
• L. Xia. Learning and Decision-Making from Rank Data.
• Y. Shoham and K. Leyton-Brown, Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations, 2009.
• N. Nisan, T. Roughgarden, E. Tardos and V. Vazirani, Algorithmic Game Theory, 2007.

General Class Policies

• Website and Announcements. We will make extensive use of piazza and the course website. You are responsible for checking the course website regularly for announcements and course materials, as well as your e-mail for communications related to the class.
• Lectures. Students are highly encouraged to attend all classes. You are responsible for all material covered and announcements made in lecture.
• Laptops and Electronic Devices. No laptops or other electronic devices are allowed in lecture, excpet that you use it for in-class polling. Even if you are diligently taking notes on your laptop, the bright screen and the activity is extremely distracting to the people behind you. Because of this, "movie theater" rules apply: no laptops, phones, or other devices with a screen on them should be out during lecture, except for in-class polling. After the polling, you must turn it off. Students who continually disrupt the class will be asked to leave.

Grading

• Project and presentations 60%. Students can team up (no more than 2 students per group, in rare cases 3 might be possible but please discuss with Lirong)
• Some published projects from past years
• Benjamin Kelly. Gerrymandering under Uncertain Preferences. Proceedings of AAAI-22 (student abstract).
• Joshua Kavner, Lirong Xia. Strategic Behavior is Bliss: Iterative Voting Improves Social Welfare. In Proceedings of NeurIPS-21. [arXiv]
• Shreyas Sekar, Sujoy Sikdar, and Lirong Xia. Condorcet Consistent Bundling with Social Choice. In Proceedings of AAMAS-17.
• David Hughes, Kevin Hwang, and Lirong Xia. Computing Optimal Bayesian Decisions for Rank Aggregation via MCMC Sampling. In Proceedings of UAI -15.
• Vote to decide the weights of the following two components (40% in total)
  • Participation is calculated by number of times the student take polls at OPRA (does not matter whether the student answer is correct, so please come and vote)
  • Exam

Homeworks

• There will be 3 homeworks. However, please do not turn in your homework. Ask questions on Piazza for help.
• The bottom line is: HWs are the best practices for the exams. (If there are exams).

Academic dishonesty

• Student-teacher relationships are based on trust. For example, students must trust that teachers have made appropriate decisions about the structure and content of the courses they teach, and teachers must trust that the assignments that students turn in are their own. Acts which violate this trust undermine the educational process. No collaboration, or any electronic devices, is allowed during exams. Violating the above policy may result in a failing grade for the class.

Acknowledgements

Thanks Felix Brandt, Yiling Chen, Ulle Endriss, Vincent Conitzer, David Parkes, Sven Seuken, Ariel Procaccial, Sven Seuken for offering tremendous helps on developing the course!