NAWA’s Polish Returns grant at AGH University

The Polish Returns programme of the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA) enables Polish scholars to return to their home country and take up employment in higher education institutions, scientific units or research institutes. The programme offers the returning academics optimal conditions to carry out world-class research or developmental work in Poland. The funds obtained under the programme cover the salary of the returning scholar and the costs of establishing a research team.

Dr Kaczmarczyk’s project entitled “ECCentriC: Exploring Candidate-Centric Committees” has received NAWA funding in the total of PLN 1,243,200.

The project focuses on identifying candidates who best reflect the conflicts arising from voters’ differing preferences. Its aim is to define how to measure this type of conflict, develop algorithms for identifying such candidates, and conduct experiments using real-world data.

The implementation of this project will contribute to the development of a new area of research on the selection of candidate groups, taking into account characteristics of candidates that have often been overlooked in the literature to date. Looking at the bigger picture, the methods developed through the project will enable more sophisticated analysis of electoral structures and candidate characteristics. They may contribute to a better understanding of social polarisation, a key factor shaping contemporary democracies; support the development of methods for aligning AI systems with expected values and objectives; and expand our ability to study and understand the properties of algorithms and models.

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Dr Andrzej Kaczmarczyk is a graduate of the AGH University Krakow. He obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science at the Faculty of Computer Science, Electronics and Telecommunications. His master’s thesis, supervised by Professor Piotr Faliszewski, focused on social choice theory. It was then that he became interested in this field, which remains the main focus of his academic work to this day.

He went on to develop his research interests whilst undertaking his doctoral studies under the supervision of Professor Rolf Niedermeier at Technische Universität Berlin. At the end of 2020, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis on the algorithmic aspects of electoral problems and resource allocation.

After obtaining his PhD, he returned to AGH University, where, as a research assistant professor, he took part in the PRAGMA project led by Professor Piotr Faliszewski. The project was funded by the European Research Council under an ERC Consolidator Grant. The researcher was developing new methods for analysing the structure of elections.

The next stage of his career was a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. Whilst working under the supervision of Professor Haifeng Xu, he conducted research into decision-making under uncertainty and in strategic games.

At present, he holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Theoretical Computer Science of the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he works with Professor Dušan Knop. It is there that he continues his work on algorithms and mathematical models used in social choice theory and game theory.

With the experience gained in Berlin, Chicago and Prague, he will return to AGH University, furthering his research at the intersection of theoretical computer science, social choice theory and mathematical methods for supporting decision-making processes.