I am a Theodore T. Miller (1922) Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, joint between Political Science and EECS (LIDS).
You can reach me at baileyf at mit dot edu.
I am accepting PhD students for the Fall 2025 application cycle.
News
Carmel's master's thesis on sortition won the ETH Medal 🏅
Ismar Volić, Jennifer Wilson, Brian Brubach, and I are organizing a conference on computational social choice at Wellesley Oct 15-17, 2025. You should come!
Our paper Alternates, Assemble! Selecting Optimal Alternates for Citizens’ Assemblies with Angelos Assos, Carmel Baharav, and Ariel Procaccia will be presented at EC '25.
Paul Gölz and I received a Structural Democracy Fellowship to fund the development of an online platform that will host several computational sortition tools developed over the past few years. This platform will be free and open-source, and it will be available for use in Fall 2025.
About me
Research. My research aims to find new ways to combine political science and computer science. The methodologies I work with strongly feature formal theory (i.e., proofs), drawing on tools from social choice, game theory, algorithms, machine learning theory, statistics, sampling methods, and survey research. I focus on applications including political methodology (particularly survey sampling and opinion measurement) and democratic innovations that facilitate more direct public participation (e.g., deliberative minipublics, participatory budgeting, and other forms of preference elicitation).
Background. Before joining MIT, I was an HDSI postdoctoral fellow at Harvard from 2024-25. I completed my PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in 2024, where I was extremely lucky to have been advised by Ariel Procaccia. My PhD was funded by a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship and an NSF GRFP.
Before that, I studied Bioengineering at UW-Madison, where I primarily researched cancer. Between undergrad and graduate school, I spent a few years doing research in economics (Yale), computer science (Drexel), and public health (Philani Nonprofit in South Africa).
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