[Theory] 11/11 TTIC Colloquium: Nihar Shah, Carnegie Mellon University

[Mary Marre via Theory]

*When:*        Tuesday, November 11, 2025 at* 2:00** pm CT *


*Where:       *Talk will be given *live, in-person* at

                   TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue

                   5th Floor, Room 530


*Virtually:*   *via* *panopto*
<https://uchicago.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=6300e308-b10e-4cc9-a21d-b38a0164ad5f>





*Who: *         Nihar Shah, Carnegie Mellon University



*Title: *A Principled Approach to Randomized Selection under Uncertainty:
Applications to Peer Review and Grant Funding

*Abstract: *In this whiteboard talk, we will consider decision-making
processes that involve evaluating and then selecting items (e.g.,
scientific peer review, hiring, admissions). Traditionally, the eventual
selection is performed by first obtaining expert evaluations, followed by
rules or deliberations, and eventually deterministically selecting a subset
of applications. More recently, citing drawbacks of the traditional
approach, a number of funding agencies worldwide have moved towards a
different decision model. These agencies have incorporated “partial
lotteries” into their decision-making: the review process remains similar
to that of the traditional process (sometimes omitting deliberations), but
the final decisions introduce a randomized component that still respects
experts’ evaluations.  We will first identify several problems in current
implementations of such partial lotteries. We will then present a
principled approach to designing improved partial lotteries with strong
theoretical guarantees and empirical performance. Based on joint work with
Alexander Goldberg and Giulia Fanti.

*Blog post: *
https://researchonresearch.blog/2025/07/12/randomizing-selection-under-uncertainty-designing-principled-partial-lotteries-for-grant-funding-and-beyond/

*Bio: *Nihar B. Shah is an Associate Professor in the Machine Learning and
Computer Science departments at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His
research focuses on the Evaluation of Science and the Science of
Evaluation. His group develops computational tools with strong theoretical
guarantees, and designs and conducts controlled experiments for
evidence-based policy design. His work has been used in the review of well
over a hundred thousand papers and thousands of proposals, across over 200
venues. He is a recipient of the Young Alumnus Medal from the Indian
Institute of Science, a JP Morgan faculty research award, Google Research
Scholar Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and the David J. Sakrison memorial
prize from UC Berkeley for a "truly outstanding and innovative PhD thesis."
Papers authored by him have won awards from HCOMP, AAMAS, IEEE Data
Storage, and several workshops.
*Host: **Jingyan Wang* <jingyanw at ttic.edu>




Mary C. Marre
Faculty Administrative Support
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue, Rm 517*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*773-834-1757*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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