(By Shuai Sun) Junxing Wang, Yaoclass 2010 of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University, recently won the Best Student Paper Awards on the Fifteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC'14. The published paper Fair Enough: Guaranteeing Approximate Maximin Share that he co-authored with his supervisor made him the first undergraduate winning this award in the world, also the first Chinese student winning this award.

Junxing Wang made a 20-minute oral presentation on the afternoon of June 9, winning recognition from all the participants. Fair division problem has always been a hot topic in game theory, which has been widely adapted in the fields of economy and computer science. In the paper Junxing Wang co-authored with Prof. Ariel Procaccia, Carnegie Mellon University, they solved the basic question about fair division and successfully made the impossibility proof of Maximin Share Guarantee. The basic question was believed for many years to be difficult to be solved in academic circles. Besides, the Approximate Fair Division they first proposed in the paper can be put into direct use in inheritance division, distribution of property in divorce and other circumstances.

Founded in 1999, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation is considered to be the top conference of computer science. This year, the conference EC’14 invited over 300 top scholars in the fields of computer science and economy, including Prof. Alvin Roth of Stanford University and Harvard University, Nobel economics laureate 2012, Prof. Paul Milgrom from Stanford University, father of auction theory and Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and Prof Jon Kleinberg from Cornell University, Member of both the US National Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Engineering. Among the 80 papers accepted in the conference this year, three were contributed from Chinese mainland with two from IIIS, Tsinghua University.