Faculty Recruiting Support CICS

Mark Wilson

faculty
UMass Amherst Department of Mathematics & Statistics
Position: 
Part-time Senior Lecturer
Office: 
A217H LGRC

Interests

Computational discrete mathematics; combinatorial algorithms; computational social science (social choice, voting, electoral system design, resource allocation, game theory, diffusion and learning in networks)

Research

Mark's research is focused on three main areas: networks and data science, collective decisions and actions, and asymptotic and enumerative combinatorics.  His research methodology often involves deriving new algorithms for computational problems, or evaluating performance of algorithms via probabilistic analysis and numerical simulations. 

Many of his recent papers in social science applications have used the axiomatic method to help inject rigor into research topics that were somewhat confusing.  His key motivation is to help groups (of humans or artificial agents) make better collective decisions. This includes the area of computational social choice, as represented at many multiagent systems and AI conferences in the last decade.

Recent projects of his include: axiomatization and computation of measures of partial balance in signed networks; legal citation networks; geometrically defined voting rules; new citation measures for scientific authors; asymptotic approximations of multivariate generating functions and applications.

Research Centers & Labs: 

Biography

Mark Wilson was born and completed undergraduate work in New Zealand, and received a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has worked in several mathematics departments in the US, but most of his career until now was spent in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland. Mark typically teaches courses in theoretical computer science (especially discrete mathematics and probability), such as COMPSCI 240 and INFO 150.

Activities & Awards

Mark has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Notices of the American Mathematical Society 2025-2027.

Mark was recently involved in a 2019-2021 NSF "Harnessing the Data Revolution" multi-institution grant  to study the relation between brain structure, individual decisions and group decisions, via brain scans, online experiments and simulations. 

Up to date list of research publications: https://markcwilson.site/Research/Outputs/papers.html

Analytic Combinatorics in Several Variables: https://acsvproject.com

Network Science: https://markcwilson.site/Research/networks/index.html

Social Choice: https://markcwilson.site/Research/social_choice/index.html

Electoral Systems: https://markcwilson.site/Research/electoral_engineering/index.html

Mark is also highly active in advocacy for reform of the scholarly publication system: see https://markcwilson.site/scholarly-publication-reform/ .