About me:

I’m a postdoc at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (formerly: MSRI), and will be joining Cornell ORIE as an assistant professor in July 2024. I think about new ways of doing democracy (e.g., citizens’ assemblies), and about how to fairly allocate resources (e.g., capacity to host refugees).

Before my current position, I did my undergrad at Saarland University in Germany, got my PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Ariel Procaccia, and spent a year as a postdoc at Harvard University.

Contact:

E-Mail:
mail at paulgoelz dot de
Mail address:
Paul Goelz
17 Gauss Way
Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Office:
SLMath Office 303

I enjoy getting to know new people and chatting about research. Whether you're a researcher, a student interested in research, a practitioner, or just curious, just schedule a virtual coffee chat!

Publications:

W2
Generative Social Choice.
Sara Fish, Paul Gölz, David Parkes, Ariel Procaccia, Gili Rusak, Itai Shapira, and Manuel Wüthrich.
In submission.
[Preprint]
W1
Putting Fair Division on the Map.
Paula Böhm, Robert Bredereck, Paul Gölz, Andrzej Kaczmarczyk, and Stanisław Szufa.
In submission.
[Preprint]
J4
Dynamic placement in refugee resettlement.
Narges Ahani, Paul Gölz, Ariel Procaccia, Alexander Teytelboym, and Andrew C. Trapp.
Operations Research (2023). Supersedes C8. Forthcoming.
[Preprint] [Recorded talk]
C13
Now we’re talking: Better deliberation groups through submodular optimization.
Jake Barrett, Kobi Gal, Paul Gölz, Rose Hong, and Ariel Procaccia.
AAAI 2023.
[Preprint]
O1
Mini-public selection: Ask what randomness can do for you.
Bailey Flanigan, Paul Gölz, and Ariel Procaccia.
Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center. Policy Briefs (2023).
[Full Brief]
T2
Social choice for social good: Proposals for democratic innovation from computer science.
Paul Gölz.
Ph.D. thesis, 2022.
[Official version]
J3
Approval-based apportionment.
Markus Brill, Paul Gölz, Dominik Peters, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, and Kai Wilker.
Mathematical programming (2022). Supersedes C6.
[Full paper]
C12
In this apportionment lottery, the House always wins.
Paul Gölz, Dominik Peters, and Ariel Procaccia.
EC 2022.
[Full paper] [Recorded talk] [Slides]
C11
Fair allocations for smoothed utilities.
Yushi Bai, Uriel Feige, Paul Gölz, and Ariel Procaccia.
EC 2022.
[Full paper] [Recorded talk] [Slides]
C10
Envy-free and Pareto-optimal allocations for agents with asymmetric random valuations.
Yushi Bai and Paul Gölz.
IJCAI 2022.
[Full paper] [Code]
J2
Fair algorithms for selecting citizens’ assemblies.
Bailey Flanigan, Paul Gölz, Anupam Gupta, Brett Hennig, and Ariel Procaccia.
Nature (2021).
[Paper] [Appendices] [Code]
C9
Incentive-compatible kidney exchange in a slightly semi-random model.
Avrim Blum and Paul Gölz.
EC 2021.
[Full paper] [Recorded talk]
C8
Dynamic placement in refugee resettlement.
Narges Ahani, Paul Gölz, Ariel Procaccia, Alexander Teytelboym, and Andrew C. Trapp.
EC 2021. Superseded by J4.
J1
The fluid mechanics of liquid democracy.
Paul Gölz, Anson Kahng, Simon Mackenzie, and Ariel Procaccia.
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (2021). Supersedes C2.
[Full paper] [Recorded talk] [Code]
C7
Neutralizing self-selection bias in sampling for sortition.
Bailey Flanigan, Paul Gölz, Anupam Gupta, and Ariel Procaccia.
NeurIPS 2020.
[Full paper] [Code]
C6
Approval-based apportionment.
Markus Brill, Paul Gölz, Dominik Peters, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, and Kai Wilker.
AAAI 2020. Superseded by J3.
C5
Paradoxes in fair machine learning.
Paul Gölz, Anson Kahng, and Ariel Procaccia.
NeurIPS 2019 Spotlight presentation (2.5% of submissions).
[Full paper] [Code]
C4
No stratification without representation.
Gerdus Benadè, Paul Gölz, and Ariel Procaccia.
EC 2019.
[Full paper] [Recorded talk] [Code]
C3
Migration as submodular optimization.
Paul Gölz and Ariel Procaccia.
AAAI 2019.
[Full paper] [Poster] [Code]
C2
The fluid mechanics of liquid democracy.
Paul Gölz, Anson Kahng, Simon Mackenzie, and Ariel Procaccia.
WINE 2018. Superseded by J1.
C1
Synthesis in distributed environments.
Bernd Finkbeiner and Paul Gölz.
FSTTCS 2017.
[Full paper]
T1
Synthesis for Petri games with one system player.
Paul Gölz.
Undergraduate thesis, 2017.

News:

October: My thesis received an honorable mention at the George B. Dantzig dissertation award.
July: My thesis was recognized with an honorable mention at the ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award.
April: I’m incredibly excited to join Cornell ORIE as an assistant professor in July 2024!
August '22: I got my PhD! You can find my thesis here.
July '22: I’m traveling to Dagstuhl, EC, and IJCAI this Summer. If you’re also there, let’s chat!
August 4 '21: After a lot of work, Nature published our new paper on citizens’ assemblies/sortition!
April 24 '21: I received a JPMorgan Chase AI Research fellowship!
April 20 '21: Harvard CRCS invited me to speak at their Rising Stars in AI seminar. My talk is recorded here!
September 15 '20: I have been supporting the lottery process for the Citizens' Panel on COVID-19 conducted by Of By For * in Michigan. Check out the video of the drawing process!
August 12 '20: This Fall, Anson and I are founding a new MD4SG working group on novel forms of Civic Participation.
April 25 '20: My team finished 41st out of 10,724 at the Google Hash Code programming competition. Thanks to Alex, Andrii, and Da Qi!

Teaching:

15750 Graduate Algorithms.
With Anupam Gupta at CMU, Spring 2020.
15453 Formal Languages, Automata, and Computability.
With Klaus Sutner at CMU, Fall 2019.
Verification.
With Bernd Finkbeiner at Saarland University, Fall 2016.
Programming 1.
With Gert Smolka at Saarland University, Fall 2015.