Professor Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award to tackle fundamental challenges in fair allocation and exchange within modern digital economies. The proposal aims to develop novel solutions for emerging platforms like online labor markets, ride-sharing services and data marketplaces where traditional economic theories fall short.
"The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of several new online economies like Upwork, Mechanical Turk, Lyft and HotCRP, which perform allocation and exchange of services, individuals and resources," explains Chaudhury. "While fair decision-making has been studied extensively in microeconomics, operations research and computer science, the existing concepts and theories do not readily extend to new economies due to various challenges."
Chaudhury's research proposal, "New Frontiers of Fairness in Allocation and Exchange Problems," addresses these critical challenges in three transformative areas of modern economic systems: the allocation and exchange of chores in online labor markets, fair distribution of indivisible goods in platforms like peer-review systems and ride-sharing apps, and establishing principles for fair data exchange in machine learning applications. As these online economies continue to grow and evolve, establishing principles for fairness becomes increasingly critical for ensuring equitable distribution of resources, services and opportunities.
The project also demonstrates a strong commitment to education and inclusivity. It will involve training graduate and undergraduate students, creating teaching materials from research findings and making those educational resources freely available online. Special attention will be given to reaching students from underrepresented groups through mentoring workshops and university initiatives. Chaudhury hopes to bring together established researchers with the next generation to collaborate and exchange ideas. The grant will also facilitate travel to conferences and university visits, enabling broader dissemination of research findings.
The project's real-world implications are substantial. "I believe that the solution concepts and techniques developed in this project will contribute to the development of fair algorithms which have broad applications across a range of fields," says Chaudhury. He particularly emphasizes the importance of establishing fair principles in data economics, given the increasing prevalence of data-driven decision-making across sectors.
The research will leverage Illinois' interdisciplinary strengths, with collaborations spanning Industrial and Systems Engineering, Economics, Computer Science, and the Business School. "UIUC has a great set of people across various departments that work at the intersection of economics and computation," Chaudhury explains, expressing his intention to expand these collaborative efforts beyond theoretical achievements.
Through this NSF CAREER Award, Professor Chaudhury's work promises to advance both the theoretical foundations and practical applications of fair decision-making in our digital economy while continuing to position Illinois at the forefront of theoretical advances in fair allocation mechanisms. By developing robust frameworks for these emerging digital economies, researchers like Chaudhury are helping to shape the future of fair resource distribution in an increasingly digital world.
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Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering in the Grainger College of Engineering and is affiliated with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. His areas of interest are Data Analytics and Operations Research