Sirin Botan

Since 2022 I've been a postdoctoral fellow at UNSW Sydney, hosted by Toby Walsh. I'm a member of the Algorithmic Decision Theory group at the School of Computer Science and Engineering.


Before coming to Sydney I completed a PhD in Computational Social Choice at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), supervised by Ulle Endriss. I also received my MSc in Logic from the University of Amsterdam in 2016. Even longer before that (in 2014), I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in Cognitive Science.


I do research on collective decision-making from a theoretical perspective using methods from economics and computer science. Specifically, my work is in computational social choice.


When I'm not studying formal models of collective decision making, I like to knit, sail, and solve crossword puzzles.


You can reach me at botan.sirin@gmail.com.

On hover this photo switches from being a photo of a knit doll resembling me to a photo of me. We are both wearing black. The photos are both taken with the same background, some kind of conifer.

Publications

  1. Sirin Botan, Angus Ritossa, Mashbat Suzuki and Toby Walsh. Maximin Fair Allocation of Indivisible Items Under Cost Utilities. International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory, 2023.
  2. Sirin Botan, Ronald de Haan, Marija Slavkovik and Zoi Terzopoulou. Egalitarian Judgment Aggregation. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 37(16), 2023. (pdf)
  3. Sirin Botan, Simon Rey, and Zoi Terzopoulou. Let's Agree to Agree: Targeting Consensus for Incomplete Preferences through Majority Dynamics. Proceedings of the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2022. (pdf)
  4. Sirin Botan. Strategyproof Social Choice for Restricted Domains. PhD thesis ILLC, University of Amsterdam, 2021. (pdf)
  5. Sirin Botan. Manipulability of Thiele Rules on Party-list Profiles. Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2021. (pdf)
  6. Sirin Botan, Ronald de Haan, Marija Slavkovik and Zoi Terzopoulou. Egalitarian Judgment Aggregation. Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2021. (pdf)
  7. Sirin Botan and Ulle Endriss. Preserving Condorcet Winners under Strategic Manipulation. Proceedings of the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021. (pdf) (Previously presented at GAIW-2020.)
  8. Sirin Botan and Ulle Endriss. Majority-Strategyproofness in Judgment Aggregation. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2020. (pdf)
  9. Sirin Botan, Umberto Grandi and Laurent Perrussel. Multi-Issue Opinion Diffusion under Constraints. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2019. (pdf) (Previously presented at EXPLORE-2017 and COMSOC-2018.)
  10. Sirin Botan, Arianna Novaro, and Ulle Endriss. Group Manipulation in Judgment Aggregation. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2016. (pdf)
  11. Sirin Botan. Propositional Opinion Diffusion with Constraints. Master's thesis ILLC, University of Amsterdam, 2016. (pdf)
The cover of my dissertation.

My PhD Dissertation

My thesis examines strategic manipulation in three areas of social choice theory—single-winner voting, multiwinner voting, and judgment aggregation. While we would like our aggregation methods to be strategyproof—meaning no agent has an incentive to misreport her preferences or opinions—strategic manipulation is difficult to avoid, no matter what specific framework we consider. A well-known and often used approach is to consider only specific types of input to the aggregation method—so-called restricted domains. In this thesis we examine whether agents can manipulate from a profile in a ''well-behaved'' domain to one outside the domain in question.

Supervision

  • Co-supervisor for honours student in computer science at UNSW, 2023.
  • Co-supervisor for honours student in computer science at UNSW, 2022.
  • Co-supervisor for MSc thesis in Social Choice at UvA, 2021.
  • Supervisor for BSc thesis in AI at UvA, 2020.
  • Co-supervisor for BSc thesis in AI at UvA, 2019.

Teaching