From theory to practice:
Behind the scenes on research deployments
July 6, 2026 @ EC'26
This workshop will focus on the practical realities of deploying algorithmic and economic systems from academic research, especially with government and non-profit partners. While economics and computer science have produced powerful tools for improving high-stakes societal systems, translating these advances into practice tends to involve complexities and challenges that are not often surfaced in academic literature.
The goal of this workshop is to create a forum for researchers to share candid first-hand experiences from deploying systems in practice. We aim to:
Identify common institutional, ethical, and operational challenges and lessons learned from real-world deployments
Discuss strategies for building and sustaining collaborations, both at the individual and institutional levels
Explore ways to better document and disseminate experiential knowledge from deployment work
Illustrate, especially to students, how to start engaging in this sort of work, including how to combine methodological progress with deployment work
This half-day workshop will tentatively include the following:
Session 1 (9-10:30am):
10 min: Introduction & workshop goals
30 min: Keynote talk - Ashish Goel (Experiences with deploying the Stanford Participatory Budgeting and Deliberation Platforms)
15 min: Talk - Erica Chiang (Personalized recommendations for the NYC high school match)
15 min: Talk - Carmel Baharav
10-20 min: Q&A
Session 2 (11am-12:30pm):
20 min: Spotlight talk - Dominik Peters (Implementing proportional voting rules for participatory budgeting in cities)
20 min: Spotlight talk - Lily Xu (From practice to theory: practitioner-engaged research in invasive management and biodiversity monitoring)
20 min: Spotlight talk - Alex Teytelboym (Refugee matching with HIAS)
10 min: Q&A
10-20 min: Roundtable discussions (e.g., better infrastructure for supporting deployment-focused research, advice for engaging with deployment-focused work, brainstorming problems that are practically applicable)
We will have a poster session during the other half of the day
Visit the Participate tab to sign up for updates or for more information on our Call for Participation (talks and posters), open until May 22, 2026!