Director of Faculty of Information Technology (FIT) invites Professor Randy Ribler to deliver a talk about "Algorithms for Fairness" during his visit to FIT.
Time: 10:00 to 11:30, Friday, May 17, 2013
Location: Room 403, E3 Building, 144 Xuan Thuy, Cau Giay, Hanoi
Speaker: Professor Randy Ribler, Dept. of Computer Science, Lynchburg College, Virginia, USA
Title: Algorithms for Fairness
Abstract: Can computers be used effectively to solve problems “fairly?” We will look at a number of fairness problems including allocating shifts to workers, dividing a set of resources between competing groups, assigning jobs to applicants, and finding political compromise. In each case it will be important to look at the criteria used to determine if a solution is fair, and to see that there are frequently multiple, sometimes conflicting, aspects of fairness. We will investigate a number of computer algorithms that can be employed to attempt to solve these problems. In the best cases, we can employ algorithms that make everyone think they got more than their fair share.
Bio: Dr. Randy Ribler is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Lynchburg College. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech, a Masters in computer science from George Mason University, and a B.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park. His dissertation introduced several new methods for visualizing the categorical time series data generally used in analyzing computer and network performance. Following his work at Virginia Tech, Dr. Ribler completed a two-year post-doctoral appointment at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), working in Computer/Network Performance Analysis. He has been a professor at Lynchburg College since 1998, where he teaches and has helped establish the department’s undergraduate research program. In 2006, he taught undergraduate and graduate classes at the Vietnam National University, Hanoi as a Fulbright Scholar, and has returned to VNU this year as a VEF U.S. Faculty Scholar.
Dr. Ribler has also worked extensively in the software development industry, principally in high-performance computing. He was a principal software architect for the Star 910/VP, a super-minicomputer, and has developed software for the special-purpose hardware used in CT scanners. He was also the principal developer of the system software for the Xenologic-X1, a commercial version of a high-performance prolog machine.