Martin Lackner

Martin Lackner is an Associate Professor in the Databases and Artificial Intelligence department at the Faculty of Informatics, Vienna University of Technology. His research focuses on computational social choice, voting theory, and algorithmic decision making, with particular expertise in multi-winner elections, approval-based voting systems, and participatory budgeting. He maintains an active research program with continuous publications in top AI and theoretical computer science venues.

Lackner's research interests center on the theoretical foundations and practical implementations of fair decision-making systems. His work bridges theoretical computer science with practical applications in democratic processes, examining how computational methods can enhance fairness, representation, and efficiency in collective decision making. He has made significant contributions to understanding the computational complexity of voting rules, developing new algorithms for preference aggregation, and establishing axiomatic properties for multiwinner election methods.

His recent publications demonstrate a consistent focus on fairness in long-term decision processes, with particular attention to perpetual voting systems, participatory budgeting mechanisms, and approval-based multiwinner rules. The research shows strong theoretical grounding combined with practical implementation considerations, as evidenced by his development of the abcvoting Python package for implementing approval-based voting rules.

Lackner has received continuous funding for his research through multiple projects:

• SuDeMa (2019–2025): Algorithms for Sustainable Group Decision Making (Austrian Science Fund)
• FAIR (2013–2018): Fixed-Parameter Tractability in Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (Austrian Science Fund)
• HINT (2012–2017): Heterogenous Information Integration (Austrian Science Fund)
• SEE (2012–2016): SPARQL Evaluation and Extensions (Vienna Science and Technology Fund)

As an academic advisor, Lackner has supervised doctoral and master's students including J. Maly (2020) on ranking sets of objects and B. Krenn (2019) on algorithms for implicit delegation to predict preferences. His work appears in premier venues including AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS, and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, demonstrating both theoretical depth and practical relevance to democratic processes and collective decision making.