Back and Forth Between Computing and Social Choice
Wes Holliday gives his talk, “Back and Forth Between Computing and Social Choice” on November 5, 2025.
EECS Colloquium
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
306 Soda Hall (HP Auditorium)
4:00 – 5:00 pm
Wes Holliday
Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley
Bio
Wesley H. Holliday is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD from Stanford in 2012 with a dissertation in logic that won the E. W. Beth Prize from The Association for Logic, Language and Information. Since then he has worked mainly in logic and social choice theory. In logic, his research has ranged over modal and nonclassical logic, logic and natural language, and logic and probability. In social choice theory, he has focused on voting theory, computational social choice, and applications of social choice to AI ethics and safety.
Abstract
In recent years, work at the intersection of computer science and social choice theory has flourished in the field of computational social choice (COMSOC). In this talk, I will give an overview of ways in which tools from computer science, including SAT solving, interactive theorem proving, machine learning, and Monte Carlo simulations, have been helpful in my work on social choice theory, as well as ways in which my collaborators and I are trying to apply social choice theory to problems in computer science, namely AI alignment and AI safety. After this overview, I will discuss in more detail some open problems from voting theory that are either explicitly computational or whose solution may be assisted by computational techniques.