REU: Robust Preference Aggregation

The Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program supports active research participation by undergraduate students in any of the areas of research funded by the National Science Foundation. Sam Saarinen has been an active participant in Dr. Goldsmith’s seminar throughout the 2013–14 academic year and has begun working with Goldsmith, despite her being on sabbatical, away from the University of Kentucky. He was actively involved in drafting her last CISE proposal, and has already introduced upper and lower bounds for the probabilistic tournament evaluation problem when all Wij = 1/2. This work is under review for a AAAI workshop on preference handling, and will be submitted for the ComSoc poster session. Sam has clearly demonstrated his ability to work on this problem, in particular by developing the bounds and implementing dynamic programming algorithms to compute the bounds, and MC simulations to validate them. This is Sam’s second research project. He has created a probabilistic tournament evaluation problem for this supplement.