Procaccia elected to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

Ariel Procaccia, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has been elected to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) as a Fellow.

AAAI Fellowships recognize “individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.”

Procaccia was selected for his "contributions to AI and society, including foundational work on economic paradigms and practical impact on governance and group decisions.”

Procaccia’s research explores the intersections of AI, algorithms, economics, government and society. His work focuses on the use of social choice theory and game theory for resource allocation and collective decision making. Among his many contributions to AI, Procaccia developed an open-source algorithm to ensure fairer selection of citizens’ assemblies, which has been used around the world by organizations in Denmark, Germany, the U.S., Belgium, and the UK.

At SEAS, Procaccia teaches a course called “Optimized Democracy” on the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of democracy to give students a better understanding,  and a technical toolbox for the design, of democratic systems.

Procaccia received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a Center for Research in Computation and Society fellow at SEAS. He has received the 2015 Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2020 Social Choice and Welfare Prize.