Evi Micha (PhD 2023).
Evi Micha (PhD 2023) is the recipient of the 2024 Best Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC).
The award recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis completed at a Canadian university in the field of artificial intelligence.
“I am deeply honoured to receive this dissertation award. This recognition is a testament to the hard work and the impact my research has had on the field of AI during my PhD,” says Micha. “It inspires me to continue pursuing innovative research and to make meaningful contributions to this field.”
The main topic of Micha’s thesis, “Fair and Efficient Social Decision Making,” is to design decision-making algorithms that treat people fairly, use limited resources efficiently and foster social good.
The first part of Micha’s thesis focuses on optimizing decision-making for social good in real-life applications such as allocating pooled diagnostic tests during an epidemic. The second part looks at improving democratic functions through civic participation, by theoretically examining innovations used in practice, such as citizens’ assemblies. The thesis explores designing selection algorithms for creating panels that are representative of the population. The final part of Micha’s thesis leverages literature on economics to propose meaningful notions of fairness in domains such as machine learning. Inspired by the idea of proportional fairness in economics, she designed proportionally fair clustering algorithms. In a similar spirit, she adopted to recommender systems the celebrated notion of envy-freeness from fair division.
Micha was supervised by Nisarg Shah, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science.
“Evi’s dissertation contains many breakthrough discoveries, which can fundamentally transform how we approach designing AI systems that are fair and socially beneficial,” says Shah. “Her dissertation work is among the best I’ve seen, and I'm glad to see her being recognized for it.”
Read more about Evi and her experience as a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science → Graduation Spotlight: Evi Micha