#IJCAI2021 invited talks round-up 1: fairness in multiwinner voting, and combining AI and robotics to augment human abilities

There is an exciting, and varied, programme of eight invited talks at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-21) this year. On the opening day of the conference, we heard presentations from Edith Elkind (University of Oxford), who talked about fairness in multiwinner voting, and Masahiro Fujita (SonyAI) who discussed combining AI and robotics for augmenting human abilities. Edith works in algorithmic game theory, with a focus on algorithms for collective decision making and coalition formation. She began by giving a brief overview of the field of computational social choice. This area of research, at the interface of social choice theory and computer science, really began in earnest following COMSOC '06, the first International Workshop on Computational Social Choice.