Title: Optimisation for Elections

Speaker: Michelle Blom

Summary:
Elections are a cornerstone of democracy. They face new risks stemming from increasing digitisation, cyber-security challenges and foreign interference. Guaranteeing that election results reflect voters’ intentions is a foundational security issue. This talk summarises over 8 years of work on the development of algorithms for analysing the outcomes of elections, and statistical methods for verifying the correctness of those outcomes.

Biography:
Michelle’s research involves developing new algorithms and heuristics for scheduling in a range of domains, including scheduling production in large open-pit mining supply chains, across both short- and long-term horizons; factory scheduling; and heuristics for autonomous transport in dynamic and adversarial domains. An additional interest is the design of statistical approaches for auditing and analysing the outcomes of elections. These methods have been piloted in several recent elections in the United States. Michelle works with OPTIMA CI Prof. Adrian Pearce.

MEETING ID: 873 1557 5255; PASSWORD: 778635

WED 27 SEPTEMBER 16:00-17:00 (AEST, Melbourne Time) – online only