November 2022

Machine Learning Lab students Shailey Mishra and Manisha Padala working under the supervision of Dr. Sujit Prakash Gujar received the First runner-up best paper award for their research work on Fairness with

Special Externalities at the 19th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI-2022) held from 10 to 13 November at Shanghai, China.

Research work as explained by the authors: 

Most of the existing algorithms for fair division do not consider externalities. Under externalities, the utility of an agent depends not only on its allocation but also on other agents’ allocation. An agent has a positive (negative) value for the assigned goods (chores). This work studies a special case of externality which we refer to as 2-D. In 2-D, an agent receives a positive or negative value for unassigned items independent of who receives them. We propose a simple valuation transformation and show that we can adapt existing algorithms using it to retain some of the fairness and efficiency notions in 2-D. However, proportionality doesn’t extend in 2-D. We redefine PROP and its relaxation and show that we can adapt existing algorithms. Further, we prove that maximin share (MMS) may not have any multiplicative approximation in this setting. Studying this domain is a stepping stone towards full externalities where ensuring fairness is much more challenging.

Full paper: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-20862-1_1

The Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI) is a biennial international event which concentrates on AI theories, technologies and their applications in the areas of social and economic importance for countries in the Pacific Rim. In the past, the conferences have been held in Nagoya (1990), Seoul (1992), Beijing (1994), Cairns (1996), Singapore (1998), Melbourne (2000), Tokyo (2002), Auckland (2004), Guilin (2006), Hanoi (2008), Daegu (2010), Kuching (2012), Gold Coast (2014), Phuket (2016), Nanjing (2018), Fiji (2019), Yokohama (2020, online) and Hanoi (2021, online).

The 19th PRICAI (2022) was held in a hybrid mode in Shanghai, China.  PRICAI-2022 aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, educators and users in AI and related communities for in-depth intellectual exchanges, research cooperation and professional development.

Conference page: https://pricai.org/2022/