My research project is Participatory Budgeting. Students work with web development, client-server development to field applications. These will be the subject of controlled experiments with real participants. The long term goal is to explore all aspects of how large numbers of people can develop constitutions, budgets, penal codes, without the benefit of a legislature or an elite.
We are also simulating this with parallel alpha-beta and A* methods. This is to determine whether a special interest group such as defense contractors or a Union with access to supercomputers can tell their employees and stockholds how to vote so as to maximize a particular budget item. That is, the defense contracts might calculate that if a particular budget was highly rated, the system would increase defense spending more than simply voting for a budget with a higher defense spending.
This is known in the social choice research field as manipulation--when one has an incentive to vote non-sincrely.
The A* adn Alpha-beta algorithms are implemented in the parallel processing systems MPI and CUDA (for GPU). This testing is the same kind of testing that would be done to benchmark and improve a chess-playing computer program.
For the first six years of this century,
our students and myself are involved in the Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards Legal XML Member
Section and have work published in the e-Contracts Technical Committee and the Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee.
They have contributed to the literature on electronic contracts, particularly
the relationship between eCommerce and litigation.
Last century, I was fortuante to have several industrial-sponsored projects that led to students having part-tme employment
and, more importantly, valuable experience.
I have prepared class notes for many of the courses I was assigned to
teaching.
and stockholders would
Involve students with interesting projects and grants.
Many of my students joined me in journal and
conference publications
For students who
do not have prerequisites
UNIX System
Programming using C (CS372) IBM Mainframe Assembly
Language Programming (last taught as CS311)