Joseph Halpern

About

Joseph Halpern was a professor of computer science and held the position of Joseph C. Ford Chair of Engineering at Cornell University. His research focused on the interface between game and decision theory and computer science, reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, and causality. He also did work on security, fault-tolerant distributed computing, and modal logic. His work was at the boundary of a number of fields, and he was recognized for his outstanding contributions with numerous awards, including being an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Halpern was described as a towering computer scientist and mentor, and his interdisciplinary approach often involved engaging with fields such as economics and philosophy.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Epistemology
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• From Outcome-Based to Language-Based Preferences

  Journal of Economic Literature · 2024 · 70 citations

  We review the literature on models that try to explain human behavior in social interactions described by normal-form games with monetary payoffs. We start by covering social and moral preferences. We then focus on the growing body of research showing that people react to the language with which actions are described, especially when it activates moral concerns. We conclude by arguing that behavioral economics is in the midst of a paradigm shift toward language-based preferences, which will requ…

  PublisherDOI

• Predicting responsibility judgments from dispositional inferences and causal attributions

  Cognitive Psychology · 2021 · 38 citations

  DOI

• Explaining Image Classifiers

  2024-10-26 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We focus on explaining image classifiers, taking the work of Mothilal et al. 2021 (MMTS) as our point of departure. We observe that, although MMTS claim to be using the definition of explanation proposed by Halpern 2016, they do not quite do so. Roughly speaking, Halpern’s definition has a necessity clause and a sufficiency clause. MMTS replace the necessity clause by a requirement that, as we show, implies it. Halpern’s definition also allows agents to restrict the set of options considered. Wh…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tracking Truth with Liquid Democracy

  Management Science · 2025-01-08 · 2 citations

  article

  The dynamics of random transitive delegations on a graph are of particular interest when viewed through the lens of an emerging voting paradigm: liquid democracy. This paradigm allows voters to choose between directly voting and transitively delegating their votes to other voters so that those selected cast a vote weighted by the number of delegations that they received. In the epistemic setting, where voters decide on a binary issue for which there is a ground truth, previous work showed that a…

  PublisherDOI

• Bayesian games with intentions

  Games and Economic Behavior · 2020 · 2 citations

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• III: Large: Causal Databases

  NSF · $2.4M · 2009–2016

• SGER: Decision-making In Complex Systems

  NSF · $90k · 2000–2002

• RI: Small: Towards a Formal Theory of Blameworthiness, Intention, and Moral Responsibility

  NSF · $427k · 2017–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Valerio Capraro

  University of Milano-Bicocca

  80 shared

• Matjaž Perc

  China Medical University

  75 shared

• Rafael Pass

  58 shared

• Ronald Fagin

  42 shared

• Moshe Y. Vardi

  34 shared

• Christopher Hitchcock

  33 shared

• Riccardo Pucella

  32 shared

• Hana Chockler

  31 shared

Awards & honors

• IEEE Fellow Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer…
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellows…
• European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Gödel…
• U.S. Department of State Fulbright Scholar (2002)
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences Member (2015)

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Jon Kleinbergh-122
• Deborah Estrinh-120
• Wen Sunh-102