Corelab Seminar
2020-2021
Alexandros Psomas
Theory and Practice of Fair Resource Allocation
Abstract.
Resource allocation is an important problem that arises in a wide range of applications in computer science and operations research. In this talk we study the fundamental problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods that arrive over time. In the first part of the talk we approach this problem from a purely theoretical angle: how can we minimize the maximum envy after all the goods have been allocated. In the second part of the talk, we adopt and further develop an emerging paradigm called virtual democracy. We will take the virtual democracy approach all the way to practice. I will present some results from ongoing work on automating the decisions faced by a Pittsburgh-based food bank called 412 Food Rescue, which matches food donations with non-profit organizations.