Jan Maly

I am an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Data, Process and Knowledge Management (DPKM) of the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) and a postdoctoral researcher in the Database and Artificial Intelligence Group (DBAI) of TU Wien.

For my research, I am focusing on my two ongoing projects:

Citizen-centered democratic innovation: This is an interdisciplinary research project, funded by the WWTF, that I co-lead together with Carolina Plescia. In this project, we aim to understand citizen preferences for the voting rules used in Participatory Budgeting and to develop algorithms respecting these preferences as much as possible. You can learn more here.

Fair online group decision making: In this project, funded by the FWF and netidee Science , we want to leverage the recent advances in our understanding of fairness and proportionality in approval-based multi-winner voting and Participatory Budgeting to provide a novel tool-box for fair group decision making in online applications. You can learn more here.

Before that, I have been working on the project “A holistic analysis of participatory budgeting” for which I was granted a Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship by the FWF. In this project, I wanted to explore Participatory Budgeting not as an isolated voting instance, but as a multi-year, city-wide process that consists of several stages. From September 2021 to April 2023, I worked on the project at the University of Amsterdam as a member of the COMSOC Group of Ulle Endriss. From May 2023 to May 2024, I was working on the project at TU Wien as a member of DBAI.

Apart from that, I work mainly in the fields of Computational Social Choice (COMSOC), Logic and Knowledge Representation. In general, I am interested in studying and developing tools that help people make better decision, individually or as a group. In particular, I currently work on non-standard voting frameworks such as Participatory Budgeting and Perpetual Voting, on the representation of preferences, and on computational complexity questions that arise in COMSOC and logic.

Besides my research work, I am also the co-founder of the European Digital Democracy network, which aims to bring together academics and practitioners actively working on or with digital democracy. It was an honor to co-organize the first in-person conference of the Network in April 2024, which brought together more than sixty scientists and practitioners for three exciting days in Rotterdam.

Finally, I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to co-supervise the PhD thesis of the brilliant Simon Rey and the equally brilliant Michael Bernreiter.

More details can be found in my CV: