Keynote speaker #1
Masahide Horita
Department of Civil Engineering
School of Engineering
University of Tokyo (Japan)
Beyond Division: Restoring Cohesion Through Foundational Group Decision Science
In an age of profound division, identifying common ground for societal consensus has become increasingly challenging. This urgency has underscored the need to uncover the fundamental principles enabling group decision-making. Recent literature suggests a new social contract theory may be required to redefine the reciprocal obligations between individuals and society. Group Decision and Negotiation (GDN) research has long addressed this core issue, now flourishing in new areas such as procedural choice and meta-decision problems. These emerging fields theorize how individuals autonomously form the rules and institutions that facilitate collective action. This keynote will reflect on the speaker’s journey toward establishing such theoretical and pragmatic foundations for a robust group decision science.
Biography
Masahide Horita is currently a Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Tokyo. His areas of interest include: procedural choice, theory of meta-decisions, evolution of cooperation, infrastructure systems management, and AI/DX in construction. He received a PhD from the London School of Economics in 1999 and subsequently worked at Durham Business School as Senior Research Associate until he moved to the University of Tokyo in October, 2000. He is the author of a number of papers and books, including Innovations in Collaborative Urban Regeneration, (co-edited with Koizumi, H) Springer. Professor Horita also advises home and overseas governments on various infrastructure policies, serving on the Central Construction Industry Council. He is a member of IEEE, a Fellow of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers (JSCE), and an associate editor of Group Decision and Negotiation journal. His recent paper, “Social Ranking Problem Based on Rankings of Restricted Coalitions,” co-authored with Takahiro Suzuki, was awarded as the Best Paper in GDN 2021.
Keynote speaker #2
Luis G. Vargas
Professor
Business Analytics & Operations
The Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business
University of Pittsburgh (USA)
Cognitive Artificial Intelligence in Conflict Resolution
Were one to ask an AI system to answer the question “Would a machine such as you be able to negotiate a conflict impartially?”, the answer reveals major issues with AI systems today such as potential bias in training data, understanding impartiality, lack of emotional intelligence, and the need for transparency and explainability. We propose a way to address these issues with research involving the Analytic Hierarchy Process and its extensions to the continuous case, and how our approach can be used in conflict resolution.
Biography
Professor of Operations, Decision Sciences and Artificial Intelligence, The Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA. B.S. in mathematics and M.S. Operations Research from the University of Granada, Spain, and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Sevilla, Spain.
Recipient of the Juan March Foundation Scholarship, Madrid, Spain, to the University of Pennsylvania, 1976-1978 where he studied under the guidance of Thomas Saaty and received his Ph.D. in Social Systems Sciences in 1979 from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Chairman of the 2nd International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (ISAHP) held in Pittsburgh August 11-14, 1991, at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, and the 15th ISAHP held in Hong Kong July 12-15, 2018. Co-Founder of the International Center for Conflict Resolution, 2018.
He is the author of over 100 papers in refereed journals and seven books.
The last book “Overcoming the Retributive Nature of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, with Thomas L. Saaty, H. Jerry Zoffer, and Amos N. Guiora. Springer 2022,” provides a road map that shows how to deal with difficult conflicts.
Round Table
Artificial Intelligence in the future of GDN
Participants:
- Liping Fang, Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada)
- Mark Kilgour, Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada)
- Roman Slowinski, Poznan University of Technology (Poland)
- Luis G. Vargas, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
Chair: Pascale Zaraté, Université Toulouse 1 Capitole (France)