About

Hello! I’m a fourth year PhD student in the Computer Sciences department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am grateful to be advised by Prof. Kirthevasan Kandasamy. Prior coming to Madison I did my undergrad at the University of Notre Dame where I majored in Computer Science and Mathematics. I spent this past summer interning at Google Research in Mountain View, CA.

Research

I am interested in the intersection of machine learning, game theory, and mechanism design. Recently I have been working on how to facilitate data sharing amongst strategic agents for machine learning problems. My goal is to design mechanisms that incentivize participants to truthfully contribute data so that they may all obtain improved models. Please feel free to reach out if any of this interests you, I’m always happy to chat!

Papers

  • Fair Division of Work in Collaborative Mean Estimation via Axiomatic Bargaining
    Alex Clinton*, Michael O. Harding*, Kirthevasan Kandasamy
    Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026
    [coming soon]

  • Incentivizing Truthful Submissions in a Data Marketplace for Mean Estimation
    Keran Chen, Alex Clinton, Kirthevasan Kandasamy
    Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2026
    [arxiv]

  • A Cramér-von Mises Approach to Incentivizing Truthful Data Sharing
    Alex Clinton, Thomas Zeng, Yiding Chen, Xiaojin Zhu, Kirthevasan Kandasamy
    Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
    [arxiv]

  • Collaborative Mean Estimation Among Heterogeneous Strategic Agents: Individual Rationality, Fairness, and Truthful Contribution
    Alex Clinton, Yiding Chen, Xiaojin Zhu, Kirthevasan Kandasamy
    Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025
    [arxiv]

* Equal contribution.

Teaching

  • Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (CS540) TA: Fall 2026

  • Data Science Programming II (CS320) TA: Spring 2024, Spring/Fall 2025

  • Discrete Math (CS240) TA: Fall 2023