---
title: "Achieving Proportional Representation in Conference Programs"
authors:
  - "Ioannis Caragiannis"
  - "Laurent Gourvès"
  - "Jérôme Monnot"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/28"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/0028.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2016
pages: "144-149"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Achieving Proportional Representation in Conference Programs

Ioannis Caragiannis, Laurent Gourvès, Jérôme Monnot

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 144-149.

## Abstract

We study the optimization problem of designing the program of a conference with parallel sessions, so that the intended participants are as happy as possible from the talks they can attend. Interestingly, this can be thought of as a two-dimensional extension of a scheme proposed by Chamberlin and Courant [1983] for achieving proportional representation in multi-winner elections. We show that different variations of the problem are computationally hard by exploiting relations of the problem with well-known hard graph problems. On the positive side, we present polynomial-time algorithms that compute conference programs that have a social utility that is provably close to the optimal one (within constant factors). Our algorithms are either combinatorial or based on linear programming and randomized rounding.