The Centre for Mathematical Social Science at The University of Auckland (New Zealand) has organized a series of lectures and seminars  given by visitors
and members of the Centre in the period of 13–22 of December 2010. This page remains as an archive.

Talks were accompanied by discussions of future research directions and research collaborations in small groups with participation of visitors and local researchers including PhD and graduate students. Links on talks go to slides provided by the speakers. All information below is from the earlier announcements and has not been updated.

Invited speakers

– Clemens Puppe (KIT, Karlsruhe)
– Bill Zwicker (Union College, New York)
– Toby Walsh (University of NSW and NICTA)
– Igor Shparlinski (Macquarie University, Sydney)

General schedule information

13 Dec (Monday) – Registration. Welcoming drink at Old Government House.
14 Dec (Tuesday) – Simple games and Secret Sharing.
15 Dec (Wednesday) – Cryptography.
17 Dec (Friday) – Comparative probabilities and simple games.
20 Dec (Monday) – Voting theory.
21 Dec (Tuesday) – Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Choice.

Tentative schedule is as follows. Each day, the morning will be devoted to formal talk presentations, and the afternoon to working groups. The morning timetable is:

1. Main talk: 9:00 – 10:00
2. Morning tea: 10:00 – 10:45
3. Contributed talk 1: 10:45 – 11:15
4. Contributed talk 2: 11:15 – 11:45

Talks in the first week will be in Engineering building, 20 Symonds St, Level 4, Room 401. Those in the second week are in Computer Science Department Room 279. For the afternoon (from 1pm to 6pm), Computer Science room 561 is booked every day.

We are planning an excursion for the weekend 18-19 of December and a dinner on 20 December [note – excursion was to Matakana area and dinner was held at Harbourside Restaurant].

Tentative schedule details

Simple Games and Secret Sharing (Organizer Arkadii Slinko)

• Bill Zwicker. The Geometry of Influence: Weighted Voting and Hyper-ellipsoids, joint work with Nicolas Houy.
• Arkadii Slinko – Complete simple games and hierarchical secret sharing schemes
• Ali Hameed – Weighted and roughly weighted ideal secret sharing schemes

Topics for discussions in the afternoon session: simple games and secret sharing schemes, hereditary rough weightedness and its characterisations, hierarchical simple games (access structures) and their properties.

Cryptography (Organizer Steven Galbraith)

• Igor Shparlinski – Group structures of elliptic curves over finite field
• Steven Galbraith – Introduction to “Learning With Errors” and lattice-based cryptography
• Edoardo Persichetti – Compact McEliece keys using quasi-dyadic Srivastava codes

Topics for discussions in the afternoon session: Cryptography from codes, Homomorphic encryption, Lattices in cryptography.

Comparative probabilities and simple games (Organizer Arkadii Slinko)

• Arkadii Slinko – Abstract simplicial complexes which are initial segments of comparative probability orders
• Tatyana Gvozdeva – On Edelman’s conjecture about simple games obtained from comparative probability orders
• Ilya Chevyrev – On the number of facets of the convex polytope of a comparative probability order.

Topics for discussions in the afternoon session: Edelman’s conjecture, characterisations of weighted simple games by polytopes

Voting Theory (organizer Mark Wilson)

• Bill Zwicker – Manipulability, Decisiveness, and Responsiveness in Voting Rules
• Toby Walsh – Manipulation of Borda and related voting rules
• Reyhaneh Reyhani (given by Mark Wilson) – Dynamics in voting games
• Egor Ianovski – Safe manipulation of the Borda rule

Topics for discussions in the afternoon session: Manipulation of Borda and related voting rules, manipulation with partial information, lotteries and voting rules. Interplay between manipulability and decisiveness.

Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Choice (Organizer Matthew Ryan)

• Clemens Puppe – Majoritarian Indeterminacy and Path-Dependence: The Condorcet Efficient Set (based on joint work with Klaus Nehring and Markus Pivato)
• Matthew Ryan – Abstract Convex Geometries and Decision Theory
• Patrick Girard, Jeremy Seligman – Logic of Social Choice

Topics for discussions in the afternoon session: Abstract convexity in decision theory; abstract convexity in social choice; modal logic for ambiguous semantics.