Fred S. Roberts, Rutgers University
An old problem in the social sciences is to find a consensus given different
opinions or preferences or votes. The heavily mathematical social science
methods developed over the years for dealing with this problem are beginning
to find novel and important applications in information technology. However,
these new applications will require substantial improvements in the methods
to face challenges posed by computational intractability, limitations on
computational power of agents, and the sheer size of the applications. This
talk will briefly describe the use of such methods in meta-search (finding
the results from multiple search engines), image processing, collaborative
filtering, and software measurement and then concentrate on the application
of such methods to the large databases of molecular biology. Specifically,
we will discuss the problem of finding a single molecular sequence that is
in some sense the consensus of a collection of molecular sequences obtained
by different subjective or objective methods or different investigators.
We will describe a surprising connection between this problem and the well-known
Kemeny-Snell notions of consensus in the social sciences
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