Phokion Kolaitis, distinguished research professor and professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering, will deliver the Spring 2022 UCSC Emeriti Lecture, titled “Some Aspects of Computational Social Choice.” The April 12th event will be held at the Hay Barn at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
Kolaitis will discuss computational social choice, an interdisciplinary field at the interface of social choice theory and computer science that applies an algorithmic lens to collective decision making. The primary emphasis of the talk will be on the computational complexity of determining winners under various voting rules and when only incomplete information about the preferences of voters is available.
Kolaitis, born in Athens, Greece, received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Athens and a Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA. Before joining UC Santa Cruz in 1988, he held teaching and research positions at the University of Chicago, Occidental College, UCLA, and Stanford University. Kolaitis has been a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center since 2004, becoming a principal research staff member in 2014.
His research interests span the areas of computational complexity, principles of database systems, and logic in computer science. Kolaitis has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, three Test-of-Time Awards, and the Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation. He is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and currently serves as president of the Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL).
The Emeriti Lecture series was established in 2003 and takes place biannually. The series is sponsored by the UCSC Emeriti Association and the UCSC Chancellor’s Office. RSVP now for the Spring 2022 Emeriti Lecture.
