Yair Zick Receives NSF CAREER Award for Work on Resource Allocation Optimization
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Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Assistant Professor Yair Zick has received an NSF CAREER award totaling $600,000 to advance research in large-scale resource allocation, emphasizing robustness, efficiency, and practicality across diverse applications.
Resource allocation, the process of distributing resources among users, tasks, or applications, is critical in many real-world scenarios, such as scheduling worker shifts, disaster relief distribution, and assigning courses to students. Zick’s research addresses key challenges such as effective preference elicitation – methods to effectively gather people’s preferences while minimizing cognitive burden; for instance, managing when an employee might be able to take either shift A or B but not both –, managing preference uncertainty, and developing computational methods capable of handling large-scale allocation problems.
"We engage in preference elicitation problems all the time, whether it’s trying to figure out what movie to watch or choosing what’s for dinner. Doing this at scale is the real challenge,” says Zick. “My goal is to help design systems that help distribute limited resources for thousands of users, like allocating courses or deciding which parts of a road network to repair.”
Leveraging interdisciplinary techniques from machine learning, game theory, and optimization, Zick’s project aims to develop intuitive algorithms and software tools designed to ensure allocations are both balanced and robust and to contribute to educational advancements in collective decision-making.
“We live in a world where we delegate significant portions of our decision-making to automated systems. This is sometimes necessary – there is no way that one person can take in the preferences of thousands of people and come up with the best possible outcome,” he says. “I hope that my work will allow us to harness powerful algorithmic frameworks while ensuring that the outcomes they select are beneficial.”
Zick joined the CICS faculty in 2020. His research intersects computational game theory, economic aspects of resource distribution, and trustworthy machine learning. He received a PhD in mathematics from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2014.
The NSF CAREER award recognizes early-career faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research, advancing departmental missions.
