Summer School on Algorithmic Game Theory 2019
2 to 14 July 2019, IIT Gandhinagar
The ACM Summer School on Algorithmic Game Theory was held from 2 to 14 July 2019 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. The school saw 50 hours of lectures by nine speakers, namely: Meghana Nasre (IIT Madras), Prajakta Nimbhorkar (CMI), Sushmita Gupta (NISER Bhubaneswar), Dinesh Garg (IBM), Siddharth Barman (IISc), Nidhi Rathi (IISc), Palash Dey (IIT Kharagpur) and Neeldhara Misra (IIT Gandhinagar), apart from several tutorials supported by Chinmay Sonar (MTech scholar, IIT Gandhinagar) and Suman Banerjee (PhD scholar, IIT Kharagpur).
The school focused on topics in Computational Social Choice, covering traditional topics and recent advances alike. The broad themes that were covered included stable and popular matchings, fair division of indivisible items and cake cutting and problems related to elections and voting. The school witnessed participation from 35 girls who had come from across various colleges in the country. A special session was hosted by Ms. Pallavi Khandelwal from Codechef, who addressed various issues related to women in computing, in particular calling out gender stereotypes related to coding and math, and also issues related to societal biases. This was an especially inspiring session that lasted well beyond the planned time, and participants opened up about the various challenges that they faced even in being able to make it to the present school.
The students appreciated the overall experience of the school. Apoorva Manerikar, a B.Tech final year student in Computer Science at MIT-World Peace University, Pune, and a participant at the Summer School, said: “A variety of eminent speakers, a fair-mix of Mathematics and Engineering graduates and algorithmic game theory—it was a perfect combination for us! The topics were new and we were thrilled at the way they were explained to us here. It was a wonderful and enriching experience.” Another participant, Namrata Sahayam, a Ph.D. scholar from Shri Govindram Seksaria Institute of Technology and Science, Indore, explained that this initiative by IIT Gandhinagar will be very beneficial for all of the women participants in their future careers. According to her, the most interesting part was the ease with which the speakers switched between the basics and detailed real-life examples while covering a wide range of topics. “To experience the education and the entire academic structure of IIT Gandhinagar was like a dream come true! The excellently managed library services and world-class faculty are some of the best features of this Institute,” she said.
All participants received certificates of participation at the end of the Summer School.