I am an Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessor) for Algorithmic Decision Making and Society at HPI, Germany. I work on a broad set of problems related to the aggregation of agents' preferences and the allocation of scarce (societal) resources. These problems often involve different stakeholders with conflicting objectives, and reasoning about what makes a solution desirable and fair is a critical step in my research.
My long-term research goal is to have a positive societal impact by developing and applying algorithmic methods grounded in rigorous theoretical research. I aim both to do foundational (theoretical) research resulting in practically relevant messages and to develop mechanisms for specific applications. I especially value interdisciplinary work at the intersection of computer science and social sciences.
I completed my postdoc at Harvard with Milind Tambe on AI for Social Good and my PhD in theoretical computer science at TU Berlin under the supervision of Rolf Niedermeier and Markus Brill. My works have been recognized by several awards, including the 2023 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award, the Best Student Paper Award at AAMAS '23, and the Best Paper Award at WINE '20.
If you are a student at HPI interested in working with me, please reach out.
niclas.boehmer [at] hpi.de | cv | dblp | Google Scholar | PhD thesis
News
Three papers accepted to ECAI '24! I am particularly pleased that two of these papers were based on the dissertations of bachelor students I had the pleasure of supervising.
One survey paper on computational experiments in COMSOC and one paper on how to make participatory budgeting algorithms more transparent have been accepted to IJCAI '24.
An extended version of my AAMAS '23 paper together with Klaus Heeger and Stanisław Szufa has been published in JAIR's conference award track.
One paper on how to integrate group fairness into ML-based resource allocation algorithms has been accepted to UAI '24.
Honored to organize the Harvard CRCS Workshop on Computing for Population Maternal and Child Health.
A blue sky paper calling for a unified axiomatic analysis for selecting representative bodies has been accepted to AAMAS '24.
My dissertation received the 2023 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award.
An extended version of my ICALP '22 paper together with Tomohiro Koana has been accepted to ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
One paper on approval-based committee elections in the wild and a tutorial on how to do computational experiments has been accepted to AAAI '24.
Honored to participate in the International Workshop on Recreating Democracy 2023 @ Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center, where I talked about The Double-Edged Sword of Algorithmic Governance: Transparency at Stake.
Happy to participate in the Radcliffe Workshop on Digital Innovations to Improve Maternal and Child Health in Africa.