We survey two key problems-Multi-Winner Determination and Hedonic Games in Computational Social Choice, with a special focus on their parameterized complexity, and propose some research challenges in the field.

Databases are often assumed to have definite content. The reality, though, is that the database at hand may be deficient due to missing, invalid, or uncertain information. As a simple illustration, the primary address of a person may be missing, or it may conflict with another primary address, or it may be improbable given the presence of nearby businesses. A common practice to address this challenge is to rectify the database by fixing the gaps, as done in data imputation, entity resolution, and data cleaning. The process of rectifying the database, however, may involve arbitrary choices due to computational limitations, such as errors in statistical or machine-learning models, or mere lack of information that even humans cannot cope with in full confidence.

This prestigious award is made for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. It is intended to recognize researchers in autonomous agents whose current work is an important influence on the field. Her work provides fundamental understanding of economic paradigms in multiagent systems, with a particular focus on computational social choice and game theory. She has made important contributions to the computational analysis of cooperative games, as well as to the studies of structured domains in elections, and hedonic games. Edith is also recognised for her service to the community.

Computational studies of voting are mostly motivated by two intended applications: the coordination of societies of artificial agents, and the study of human collective decisions whose complexity requires the use of computational techniques. Both research directions are too often confined to theoretical studies, with unrealistic assumptions constraining their significance for real-world situations. Most practical applications of these results are therefore confined to low-stakes decisions, which are of great importance in expanding the use of algorithms in society, but are far from high-stakes choices such as political elections, referenda, or parliamentary decisions, which societies still make using old-fashioned technologies like paper ballots. In this paper I argue in favour of conceiving "voting avatars", artificial agents that are able to act as proxies for voters in collective decisions at any level of society. Besides being an ideal test-bed for a large number of techniques developed in the field of multiagent systems and artificial intelligence in general, agent-mediated social choice may also suggests innovative solutions to the low voter participation that is endemic in most practical implementations of electronic decision processes.

We discuss the connection between computational social choice (comsoc) and computational complexity. We stress the work so far on, and urge continued focus on, two less-recognized aspects of this connection. Firstly, this is very much a two-way street: Everyone knows complexity classification is used in comsoc, but we also highlight benefits to complexity that have arisen from its use in comsoc. Secondly, more subtle, less-known complexity tools often can be very productively used in comsoc.

And see also this great piece from Mashable on what manufacturers are up to next. In the near future, sensing algorithms will achieve super-human performance for capabilities required for driving. Automated perception, including vision, is already near or at human-performance level for well-defined tasks such as recognition and tracking. Advances in perception will be followed by algorithmic improvements in higher level reasoning capabilities such as planning. Beyond self-driving cars, we'll have a variety of autonomous vehicles including robots and drones. AI also has the potential to transform city transportation planning, but is being held back by a lack of standardisation in the sensing infrastructure and AI techniques used. Accurate predictive models of individuals' movements, their preferences, and their goals are likely to emerge with the greater availability of data. That last sentence is worth reflecting on for a while. It does indeed seem highly likely to happen, but that doesn't mean we have to like what it might mean for society.

And see also this great piece from Mashable on what manufacturers are up to next. In the near future, sensing algorithms will achieve super-human performance for capabilities required for driving. Automated perception, including vision, is already near or at human-performance level for well-defined tasks such as recognition and tracking. Advances in perception will be followed by algorithmic improvements in higher level reasoning capabilities such as planning. Beyond self-driving cars, we'll have a variety of autonomous vehicles including robots and drones. AI also has the potential to transform city transportation planning, but is being held back by a lack of standardisation in the sensing infrastructure and AI techniques used. Accurate predictive models of individuals' movements, their preferences, and their goals are likely to emerge with the greater availability of data. That last sentence is worth reflecting on for a while. It does indeed seem highly likely to happen, but that doesn't mean we have to like what it might mean for society.

This column provides an encounter with the Artificial Intelligence research community in the state of Israel. The first section introduces this community and its special attributes. The second section provides overview on some recent research projects done in Israel. The author serves as the chair of the Israeli AI association

Peer reviewing is the key ingredient of evaluating the quality of scientific work. Based on the review scores assigned by the individual reviewers to the submissions, program committees of conferences and journal editors decide which papers to accept for publication and which to reject. However, some reviewers may be more rigorous than others, they may be biased one way or the other, and they often have highly subjective preferences over the papers they review. Moreover, each reviewer usually has only a very local view, as he or she evaluates only a small fraction of the submissions. Despite all these shortcomings, the review scores obtained need to be aggregrated in order to globally rank all submissions and to make the acceptance/rejection decision. A common method is to simply take the average of each submission's review scores, possibly weighted by the reviewers' confidence levels. Unfortunately, the global ranking thus produced often suffers a certain unfairness, as the reviewers' biases and limitations are not taken into account. We propose a method for calibrating the scores of reviewers that are potentially biased and blindfolded by having only partial information. Our method uses a maximum likelihood estimator, which estimates both the bias of each individual reviewer and the unknown "ideal" score of each submission. This yields a quadratic program whose solution transforms the individual review scores into calibrated, globally comparable scores. We argue why our method results in a fairer and more reasonable global ranking than simply taking the average of scores. To show its usefulness, we test our method empirically using real-world data.

Computational social choice is an expanding field that merges classical topics like economics and voting theory with more modern topics like artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, and computational complexity. This book provides a concise introduction to the main research lines in this field, covering aspects such as preference modelling, uncertainty reasoning, social choice, stable matching, and computational aspects of preference aggregation and manipulation. The book is centered around the notion of preference reasoning, both in the single-agent and the multi-agent setting. It presents the main approaches to modeling and reasoning with preferences, with particular attention to two popular and powerful formalisms, soft constraints and CP-nets. The authors consider preference elicitation and various forms of uncertainty in soft constraints.