Michael Chavrimootoo, URCS PhD Candidate
(he/him/his)
I am a final year (graduating in May 2024) Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Rochester under the supervision
of
Professor Lane A. Hemaspaandra.
I am on the job market this academic year (for a Summer or Fall 2024 start)!
My research spans computational social choice (COMSOC), which falls within AI (multiagent systems), but also draws on social choice theory, economics, political science, algorithms, and complexity theory.
I'm driven by a need to understand the landscape of the field to find surprising structures and techniques that open new avenues.
This had led me to explore the problems
in COMSOC (and complexity) to determine precisely what separates them from other problems, and when collapses are hiding in plain sight.
Before that, I completed my undergraduate CS BS and Political Science BA at UR, with a focus on courses in CS theory, elections, and economic development.
Some problems I've worked on:
- Determining which standard electoral control types are the same in concrete election systems (equivalences that have evaded the field for years).
- Linking search and decision complexities of equivalent electoral control problems, using a new framework we introduced to study/relate the complexity of search problems.
- Determining what properties of an election system lead certain control types to collapse (which immediately yields results for infinitely many systems).
- Providing tools to study the complexity of grid games with irreversible gravity (which were not well-studied; this opens up new research avenues).
I'm always open to exploring new theoretical concepts in computer science, economics, and math, along with their applications.
Feel free to reach out if you have overlapping interests!
Teaching (as Adjunct Faculty/Instructor)