The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year` CAREER grant to Amy Greenwald of this department. CAREER grants are, NSF says, their `most prestigious awards for new faculty members' to `recognize and support the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees will be selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.'
Amy received this award for her project `Computational social choice theory: strategic agents and iterative mechanisms.' In her proposal she said, `My career goal is to advance the state of the art of automated strategic reasoning through research and teaching at the intersection of computer science and economics. In research, I am beginning to develop a computational theory of social choice, emphasizing the interplay of artificially intelligent agents and social choice mechanisms. In education, I am designing courses and degree programs across computer science and economics, and encouraging women to participate in such programs and explore careers that build on the resulting cross-disciplinary skill sets.
`My specific research initiative is to develop a computational theory of social choice through two intertwined goals: the design of mechanisms that implement the approximate social choices of boundedly rational strategic agents; and conversely, the design of boundedly rational strategic agents, given computational social choice mechanisms. To achieve these goals, I will rely on the tools of game theory, dynamic programming, reinforcement learning, and computational learning theory. My research agenda is ambitious, but it is potentially of such enormous practical impact that anwy progress in the proposed direction will be worthwhile.'
