Funding, Job offers

2 PostDoc positions in the ERC grant PRO-DEMOCRATIC

by Piotr Skowron

The  Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of the University of Warsaw offers two PostDoc positions in the ERC grant, PRO-DEMOCRATIC, led by Piotr Skowron. The grant starts in October 2023.

About the project

The project focuses on formal models where a group of individuals needs to make a collective decision. The decision must truly represents a compromise. We focus on group fairness understood as proportionality.  There are numerous real-life scenarios that involve collective (public) decisions, and where our solutions apply. Examples include: elections of representative bodies (such as parliaments, faculty boards, etc.) or participatory budgeting elections (where citizens decide how to allocate a part of a municipal budget). In addition, proportional algorithms are used for selecting nominees for an award, for constructing rankings of movies or books, for selecting validators in consensus protocols, such as the blockchain, or for improving genetic algorithms.

The goal of this project is to develop generic methods of reasoning about equity of treatment of voters, and to design new algorithms that satisfy the most demanding criteria of proportionality. The new methods should be applicable to a number of specific models that concern public decisions.

Details of the position
  • Salary: 14 000PLN per month, before tax (3150EUR per month assuming the current exchange rate).
  • Travel: Additional budget for participating in conferences and for research visits.
  • Duration: one-year or two-years (negotiable).
Requirements
  • A PhD (or close to completion), in a relevant area of science (which could be computer science, mathematics, economics or operations research).
  • A documented track record of completing research projects in the area of algorithms, social choice, game theory, multi-agent systems, operations research, or machine learning as witnessed by published peer-reviewed work, as well as ongoing research activities in these areas. Publications in venues such as EC, WINE, AAAI/IJCAI, STOC/FOCS, SODA, NeurIPS, ICML would be highly desirable.
  • Ability to work in a team, including supervising Undergraduate and Masters’ projects.
  • Ability to implement algorithms and to perform computer simulations would be an advantage.
How to apply

The application (cv + track record + a letter of recommendation) should be sent to p.skowron@mimuw.edu.pl. The closing date is August 8.