Conitzer Awarded $50,000 Guggenheim Fellowship
20 April 2015 3:51PM
Most people agree that contributing to landfills and using gasoline are both bad for environment; however, disagreements may arise when determining the tradeoff: How many bags of trash are equivalent to one gallon of gasoline usage?
This type of question is the foundation for Professor Vincent Conitzer’s ongoing research project on “crowdsourcing societal tradeoffs.” Conitzer has been named a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow for his work in computational social choice, and he will receive a $50,000 grant to support his research.
“Social choice provides a general framework for thinking about how to reach a decision based on the generally diverging preferences of multiple parties. Still, there are unique aspects to the particular types of question we are investigating, so that new theory and new algorithms need to be developed to obtain a good methodology,” he explained.
Conitzer, who has appointments in the Departments of Computer Science and Economics, is among 175 winners of this year’s fellowships. He and two other Duke University scholars — biology Professor Sheila Patek and art, art history, and visual studies Ph.D. student Pinar Yoldas — were chosen from over 3,100 applicants in the United States and Canada.
“The competition is tremendous, not just in quantity but also in quality,” Conitzer said. “It is a good thing that at the outset I did not understand just how tremendous it would be, or I might not have applied at all! I feel incredibly honored to be associated with all the amazing other people who have received the fellowship.”
This fellowship program is designed to create funding opportunities for mid-career professionals in the arts, humanities, and sciences who “have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”
Though the Guggenheim Foundation lists Conitzer under the computer science discipline, his work is interdisciplinary: a blend of computer science and economic theory.
“This is an extremely fertile research area,” he said. “On the one hand, techniques from computer science allow us to directly bring into practice ideas from economic theory. On the other hand, computer systems are increasingly interconnected, and this introduces economic phenomena as multiple parties interact in the same environment.”
Last June Conitzer received the seventh Social Choice and Welfare Prize for his contributions in computational social choice. He will go on a semester-long sabbatical in the fall to UC Berkeley’s Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.
Learn more about research at Duke Economics.