Martin Lackner

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Principal investigator / researcher
TU Wien
Databases and Artificial Intelligence Group
Favoritenstraße 9, 1040 Wien, Austria
Research: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Social Choice, Algorithms

I am leading the research project "Algorithms for Sustainable Group Decision Making" funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Contents

Short biography

Martin Lackner is principal investigator of the project "Algorithms for Sustainable Group Decision Making", which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and based at TU Wien. Before that, he was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and at TU Wien. In June 2014, he completed his doctoral studies in computer science (Dr. techn.) at the TU Wien with Reinhard Pichler as advisor and Stefan Szeider as co-advisor. Martin Lackner has studied Mathematics in Computer Science at TU Wien and for one semester at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Research interests

I am working in the broad area of Artificial Intelligence and more specifically in Computational Social Choice, a discipline concerned with algorithmic aspects of collective decision making and preference aggregation. Within this field, I have worked on multi-winner elections, algorithms for specific preference domains, Liquid Democracy, axiomatic analysis of voting rules, among other topics. My interests beyond Computational Social Choice are algorithms, especially parameterized algorithms, computational aspects of permutation problems, and logic in Artificial Intelligence.

New book: Multi-Winner Voting with Approval Preferences

Book cover: Multi-Winner Voting with Approval Preferences

Piotr Skowron and I are happy to announce the publication of our book about multi-winner voting with approval preferences. The main focus is on axiomatic analysis, algorithmic results and applications that are relevant in artificial intelligence, computer science and elections of any kind. Moreover, we give a systematic review of major ABC voting rules (including recent additions to this list).

The book is published by Springer. It is open access and can be downloaded for free.

Manuscripts

    Edith Elkind, Martin Lackner, Dominik Peters Preference Restrictions in Computational Social Choice: A Survey This draft surveys preference restrictions, their importance for social choice and algorithmic applications. Feedback is very welcome.
    [ Arxiv ]

Publications

2024

  1. Markus Brill, Rupert Freeman, Svante Janson and Martin Lackner Phragmén's Voting Methods and Justified Representation In Mathematical Programming, 203: 47-76, 2024.
    [ BibTeX | doi | www ]
  2. Ayumi Igarashi, Martin Lackner, Oliviero Nardi and Arianna Novaro Repeated Fair Allocation of Indivisible Items In Proceedings of the 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024), AAAI Press, 2024.
    [ BibTeX | PDF ]

2023

  1. Martin Lackner and Jan Maly Approval-Based Shortlisting In Social Choice and Welfare, 2023.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  2. Martin Lackner, Peter Regner and Benjamin Krenn abcvoting: A Python package for approval-based multi-winner voting rules In Journal of Open Source Software, 8 (81): 4880, 2023.
    [ BibTeX | doi | www ]
  3. Martin Lackner and Jan Maly Proportional Decisions in Perpetual Voting In Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023), pages 5722-5729, AAAI Press, 2023.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  4. Markus Brill, Stefan Forster, Martin Lackner, Jan Maly and Jannik Peters Proportionality in Approval-Based Participatory Budgeting In Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023), pages 5524-5531, AAAI Press, 2023.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  5. Piotr Faliszewski, Martin Lackner, Krzysztof Sornat and Stanislaw Szufa An Experimental Comparison of Multiwinner Voting Rules on Approval Elections In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023), pages 2675-2683, ijcai.org, 2023.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  6. Jan Maly, Simon Rey, Ulle Endriss and Martin Lackner Fairness in Participatory Budgeting via Equality of Resources In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2023), pages 2031-2039, IFAAMAS, 2023.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  7. Martin Lackner, Jan Maly and Oliviero Nardi Free-Riding in Multi-Issue Decisions In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2023), pages 2040-2048, IFAAMAS, 2023.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  8. Martin Lackner and Piotr Skowron Multi-Winner Voting with Approval Preferences Springer International Publishing, SpringerBriefs in Intelligent Systems , 2023.
    [ BibTeX | doi | www | Arxiv ]

2022

  1. Markus Brill, Théo Delemazure, Anne-Marie George, Martin Lackner and Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin Liquid Democracy with Ranked Delegations In Proceedings of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2022), pages 4884-4891, AAAI Press, 2022.
    [ BibTeX | www | Arxiv ]
  2. Jiehua Chen, Martin Lackner and Jan Maly Participatory Budgeting with Donations and Diversity Constraints In Proceedings of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2022), pages 9323-9330, AAAI Press, 2022.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  3. Stanislaw Szufa, Piotr Faliszewski, Lukasz Janeczko, Martin Lackner, Arkadii Slinko, Krzysztof Sornat and Nimrod Talmon How to Sample Approval Elections? In Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2022), pages 496-502, ijcai.org, 2022.
    [ BibTeX | www | Arxiv ]

2021

  1. Martin Lackner and Piotr Skowron Consistent Approval-Based Multi-Winner Rules In Journal of Economic Theory, 192: 105173, 2021.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  2. Martin Lackner and Jan Maly Approval-Based Shortlisting In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2021), pages 1566-1568, IFAAMAS, 2021.
    [ BibTeX | PDF | Arxiv ]
  3. Thekla Hamm, Martin Lackner and Anna Rapberger Computing Kemeny Rankings From $d$-Euclidean Preferences In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT 2021), pages 147-161, Springer International Publishing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 13023, 2021.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  4. Martin Lackner, Jan Maly and Simon Rey Fairness in Long-Term Participatory Budgeting In Proceedings of the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021), pages 299-305, ijcai.org, 2021.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  5. Martin Lackner, Jan Maly and Simon Rey Fairness in Long-Term Participatory Budgeting (Extended Abstract) In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2021), pages 1566-1568, IFAAMAS, 2021.
    [ BibTeX | PDF ]

2020

  1. Martin Lackner and Piotr Skowron Utilitarian Welfare and Representation Guarantees of Approval-Based Multiwinner Rules In Artificial Intelligence, 288: 103366, 2020.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  2. Paul Harrenstein, Marie-Louise Lackner and Martin Lackner A Mathematical Analysis of an Election System Proposed by Gottlob Frege In Erkenntnis, 87 (6): 2609–2644, 2020.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  3. Dominik Peters and Martin Lackner Preferences Single-Peaked on a Circle In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 68: 463-502, 2020.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  4. Zack Fitzsimmons and Martin Lackner Incomplete Preferences in Single-Peaked Electorates In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 67: 797-833, 2020.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  5. Martin Lackner Perpetual Voting: Fairness in Long-Term Decision Making In Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020), pages 2103-2110, AAAI Press, 2020.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  6. Adrian Haret, Martin Lackner, Andreas Pfandler and Johannes P. Wallner Proportional Belief Merging In Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020), pages 2822-2829, AAAI Press, 2020.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  7. Robert Bredereck, Piotr Faliszewski, Michal Furdyna, Andrzej Kaczmarczyk and Martin Lackner Strategic Campaign Management in Apportionment Elections In Proceedings of the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2020), pages 103-109, ijcai.org, 2020.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]

2019

  1. Martin Lackner and Piotr Skowron A Quantitative Analysis of Multi-Winner Rules In Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2019), pages 407-413, ijcai.org, 2019.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  2. Daan Bloembergen, Davide Grossi and Martin Lackner On Rational Delegations in Liquid Democracy In Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019), pages 1796-1803, AAAI Press, 2019.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  3. Clemens Gangl, Jan Maly, Martin Lackner and Stefan Woltran Aggregating Expert Opinions in Support of Medical Diagnostic Decision-Making In 11th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KR4HC-2019), 2019.
    [ BibTeX | PDF ]

2018

  1. Martin Lackner and Piotr Skowron Consistent Approval-Based Multi-Winner Rules In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC 2018), pages 47-48, ACM, 2018, shortlisted for the EC-2018 best paper award.
    [ BibTeX | www | Arxiv ]
  2. Martin Lackner and Piotr Skowron Approval-Based Multi-Winner Rules and Strategic Voting In Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2018), pages 340-436, ijcai.org, 2018.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  3. Theresa Csar, Martin Lackner and Reinhard Pichler Computing the Schulze Method for Large-Scale Preference Data Sets In Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2018), pages 180-187, ijcai.org, 2018.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  4. Robert Bredereck, Piotr Faliszewski, Ayumi Igarashi, Martin Lackner and Piotr Skowron Multiwinner Elections with Diversity Constraints In Proceedings of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2018), pages 933-940, AAAI Press, 2018.
    [ BibTeX | PDF | Arxiv ]
  5. Piotr Faliszewski, Martin Lackner, Dominik Peters and Nimrod Talmon Effective Heuristics for Committee Scoring Rules In Proceedings of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2018), pages 1023-1030, AAAI Press, 2018.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  6. Haris Aziz, Edith Elkind, Shenwei Huang, Martin Lackner, Luis Sánchez-Fernández and Piotr Skowron On the Complexity of Extended and Proportional Justified Representation In Proceedings of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2018), pages 902-909, AAAI Press, 2018.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]

2017

  1. Edith Elkind, Martin Lackner and Dominik Peters Structured Preferences In Trends in Computational Social Choice, pages 187-207, AI Access, 2017.
    [ BibTeX | PDF ]
  2. Gábor Erdélyi, Martin Lackner and Andreas Pfandler Computational Aspects of Nearly Single-Peaked Electorates In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 58: 297-337, 2017.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  3. Marie-Louise Lackner and Martin Lackner On the Likelihood of Single-Peaked Preferences In Social Choice and Welfare, 48 (4): 717-745, 2017.
    [ BibTeX | www | Arxiv ]
  4. Piotr Skowron, Martin Lackner, Markus Brill, Dominik Peters and Edith Elkind Proportional Rankings In Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2017), pages 409-415, ijcai.org, 2017.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  5. Haris Aziz, Edith Elkind, Piotr Faliszewski, Martin Lackner and Piotr Skowron The Condorcet Principle for Multiwinner Elections: From Shortlisting to Proportionality In Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2017), pages 84-90, ijcai.org, 2017.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  6. Markus Brill, Rupert Freeman, Svante Janson and Martin Lackner Phragmén's Voting Methods and Justified Representation In Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2017), pages 406-413, AAAI Press, 2017.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  7. Dominik Peters and Martin Lackner Preferences Single-Peaked on a Circle In Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2017), pages 649-655, AAAI Press, 2017.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  8. L. Sánchez-Fernández, E. Elkind, M. Lackner, N. Fernández, J. A. Fisteus, P. Basanta Val and P. Skowron Proportional Justified Representation In Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2017), pages 670-676, AAAI Press, 2017.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF | Arxiv ]
  9. Theresa Csar, Martin Lackner, Reinhard Pichler and Emanuel Sallinger Winner Determination in Huge Elections with MapReduce In Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2017), pages 451-458, AAAI Press, 2017.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]

2016

  1. Marie-Louise Bruner and Martin Lackner A Fast Algorithm for Permutation Pattern Matching Based on Alternating Runs In Algorithmica, 75 (1): 84-117, 2016.
    [ BibTeX | www | Arxiv ]
  2. Edith Elkind, Martin Lackner and Dominik Peters Preference Restrictions in Computational Social Choice: Recent Progress In Proceedings of the 25th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2016), Early Career Spotlight track, pages 4062-4065, ijcai.org, 2016.
    [ BibTeX | PDF ]
  3. Michael H. Albert, Marie-Louise Lackner, Martin Lackner and Vincent Vatter The Complexity of Pattern Matching for 321-Avoiding and Skew-Merged Permutations In Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 18 no. 2, Permutation Patterns 2015, 2016.
    [ BibTeX | www | Arxiv ]

2015

  1. Edith Elkind and Martin Lackner Structure in Dichotomous Preferences In Proceedings of the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015), pages 2019-2025, ijcai.org, 2015.
    [ BibTeX | PDF | Arxiv ]
  2. Edith Elkind, Piotr Faliszewski, Martin Lackner and Svetlana Obraztsova The Complexity of Recognizing Incomplete Single-Crossing Preferences In Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2015), pages 865-871, AAAI Press, 2015.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  3. Gábor Erdélyi, Martin Lackner and Andreas Pfandler Manipulation of k-Approval in Nearly Single-Peaked Electorates In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT 2015), pages 71-85, Springer International Publishing, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9346, 2015.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]

2014

  1. Martin Lackner Incomplete Preferences in Single-Peaked Electorates In Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2014), pages 742-748, AAAI Press, 2014.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  2. Edith Elkind and Martin Lackner On Detecting Nearly Structured Preference Profiles In Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2014), pages 661-667, AAAI Press, 2014.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  3. Martin Kronegger, Martin Lackner, Andreas Pfandler and Reinhard Pichler A Parameterized Complexity Analysis of Generalized CP-Nets In Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2014), pages 1091-1097, AAAI Press, 2014.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  4. Martin Lackner Detecting Structure in Permutations and Preferences Ph.D. Thesis, Vienna University of Technology, 2014.
    [ BibTeX ]

2013

  1. Gábor Erdélyi, Martin Lackner and Andreas Pfandler Computational Aspects of Nearly Single-Peaked Electorates In Proceedings of the 27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2013), pages 283-289, AAAI Press, 2013.
    [ BibTeX | PDF | Arxiv ]
  2. Marie-Louise Bruner and Martin Lackner The Computational Landscape of Permutation Patterns In Pure Mathematics and Applications: Special Issue for the Permutation Patterns 2012 Conference, 24 (2): 83-101, 2013.
    [ BibTeX | PDF | Arxiv ]

2012

  1. Martin Lackner and Andreas Pfandler Fixed-Parameter Algorithms for Finding Minimal Models In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2012), pages 85-95, AAAI Press, 2012.
    [ BibTeX | PDF ]
  2. Martin Lackner and Andreas Pfandler Fixed-Parameter Algorithms for Closed World Reasoning In Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2012), pages 492-497, IOS Press, 2012.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  3. Marie-Louise Bruner and Martin Lackner A Fast Algorithm for Permutation Pattern Matching Based on Alternating Runs In Proceedings of the 13th Scandinavian Symposium and Workshops on Algorithm Theory (SWAT 2012), pages 261-270, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7357, 2012.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  4. Martin Lackner, Reinhard Pichler, Stefan Rümmele and Stefan Woltran Multicut on Graphs of Bounded Clique-Width In Proceedings of the 6th Annual International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (COCOA 2012), pages 115-126, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7402, 2012.
    [ BibTeX | www | PDF ]
  5. Leo Brueggeman, Michael R. Fellows, Rudolf Fleischer, Martin Lackner, Christian Komusiewicz, Yiannis Koutis, Andreas Pfandler and Frances A. Rosamond Train Marshalling Is Fixed Parameter Tractable In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2012), pages 51-56, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7288, 2012.
    [ BibTeX | www ]
  6. Marie-Louise Bruner and Martin Lackner From Peaks to Valleys, Running Up and Down: Fast Permutation Pattern Matching In TinyToCS, Vol. 1, 2012.
    [ BibTeX | PDF ]

Open-source code and software

Python code related to my research projects is available at Github. Feel free to contact me with questions.
  1. abcvoting: implementations of approval-based committee (multi-winner) rules DOI
  2. perpetual: implementations of several perpetual voting rules (see my paper "Perpetual Voting: Fairness in Long-Term Decision Making")
  3. frege: an implementation of Frege's voting method (see my paper "A Mathematical Analysis of an Election System Proposed by Gottlob Frege") DOI
  4. apportionment: implementations of common apportionment methods
  5. incompletesp: testing whether a preference profile is possibly single peaked (details see here)
And here's a list of list of awesome COMSOC tools, which I maintain.