Over the last decade, social choice has become one of my primary research areas. Broadly speaking, this is the study of how societies make decisions. In my opinion, the inability of major democracies to make good collective decisions and have deliberative conversations is one of the biggest problems facing our world. This problem is too big, but there is still meaningful research that one can conduct here. This is an area in which industry has very little presence, which makes it specially important for us academics to not just conduct theoretical research, but also build and deploy systems. It is also important to keep asking big questions like: What is the nature of deliberation? What is the normative basis of representational fairness? What does it mean to have equal voice?

If you are a PhD student interested in working with me on this area, you have to be comfortable with learning (and then using) many different types of methods -- algorithmic, game-theoretic, empirical, normative, and experimental.