on Algorithmic Mechanism Design
December 8-12, 2025, Coimbatore, India
We are excited to invite participants to the ACM India IndiCS Winter School and Seminar on Algorithmic Mechanism Design, hosted at the serene Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus.
Mechanism design is a subfield of economics focused on engineering protocols in environments where agents are strategic. Algorithmic Mechanism Design (AMD) blends this with computational insights from theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. This event aims to explore impactful, open problems in AMD through lectures and collaborative sessions.
The program will be held in person and consists of:
Tentative themes include:
Tentative schedule of the school: The speakers of the school will include leading researchers in this area who can provide the audience with the current state-of-the-art and open questions in those domains. In this pursuit, we proposed to have speakers both from CS and Economics since the area of AMD is interdisciplinary. We plan to have two lectures of about 1.5 hours from each speaker of the school. The remaining time will be devoted to discussions and paper presentations from the students.
Tentative schedule of the seminar: After the school session, we plan to divide the participants into minimally overlapping problem-solving groups (PSGs) focusing on topics discussed during the school. Each group will conduct their own seminars, engage in discussions, and work towards solving a well-defined problem. Given that these research areas are still emerging and actively developing, we hope to see significant progress in several, if not all, areas.
Days 1 and 2: During the first two days of the seminar, each PSG is expected to engage with the literature introduced in the school and seek out additional relevant literature. The objective is to formulate a concrete, novel, and unsolved open question. Each PSG will present their findings and ideas to the group at least once by the end of the second day.
Days 2 and 3: The last two days will address the identified problems, with the methods and formats determined by each group's preference. On the final day, there will be one presentation from each PSG discussing the outcomes of their seminar work.
Relevance and Benefits to the Indian Computing Community: The seminar and school will focus on topics tailored to the computing community in India. India already has a growing cohort of researchers–faculty, postdocs, graduate, and undergraduate students–actively working in algorithmic mechanism design (AMD). This seminar seeks to establish a robust platform for dialogue between the Indian computing community and AMD researchers worldwide.
Key objectives of the seminar: Fostering the publication of new research papers, facilitating collaborations, creating comprehensive surveys, generating ideas for graduate and undergraduate courses, and developing high-quality lecture and study resources. We also aim to launch a unified online forum–through mailing lists or collaboration platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams–to enable seamless communication and interaction. These forums will pave the way for additional seminars and reading groups across institutions in India.
This event is targeted at PhD students, MS students, and postdocs who are beginner or mid-level researchers in areas such as:
Participation is by invitation only. This will be an offline event, as we strongly believe in the value of in-person interaction for fostering collaboration. Modeled after Dagstuhl seminars, there is a nominal registration fee per participant for IndiCS seminars, which helps supplement the support provided by ACM India. This fee (approximately ₹9,000 per participant) covers boarding, lodging, and other facilities at the seminar venue for all five days. Participants are expected to cover their own travel to and from the venue, similar to the Dagstuhl seminar model.
Financial support from ACM: For a limited number of student and postdoc participants from India, the registration fees will be covered entirely by ACM India. ACM India also provides a Research Facilitation Grant, which can be utilized by Indian student/postdoc participants selected for the seminar.
Speaker details will be added soon.
The event will be held at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore — a green, peaceful, and fully residential campus ideal for focused academic discussions.
For any other inquiries, please write to:
swaprava AT cse.iitb.ac.in
Rohit.Vaish AT cse.iitd.ac.in