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Recommendation systems have received considerable attention recently. However, most research has been focused on improving the performance of collaborative filtering (CF) techniques. Social networks, indispensably, provide us extra…
Online information ecosystems are now central to our everyday social interactions. Of the many opportunities and challenges this presents, the capacity for artificial agents to shape individual and collective human decision-making in such…
Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…
Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…
Algorithmic rankers have a profound impact on our increasingly data-driven society. From leisurely activities like the movies that we watch, the restaurants that we patronize; to highly consequential decisions, like making educational and…
The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information. Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of communities…
Rankings are ubiquitous in the online world today. As we have transitioned from finding books in libraries to ranking products, jobs, job applicants, opinions and potential romantic partners, there is a substantial precedent that ranking…
Modern technology has drastically changed the way we interact and consume information. For example, online social platforms allow for seamless communication exchanges at an unprecedented scale. However, we are still bounded by cognitive and…
We introduce a new model that mimics the strong and sudden effects induced by conformity in tightly interacting human societies. Such effects range from mere crowd phenomena to dramatic political turmoil. The model is a modified version of…
Taking advice from others requires confidence in their competence. This is important for interaction with peers, but also for collaboration with social robots and artificial agents. Nonetheless, we do not always have access to information…
People often stick to their existing beliefs, ignoring contradicting evidence or only interacting with those who reinforce their views. Social media platforms often facilitate such tendencies of homophily and echo-chambers as they promote…
Innovation in Information and Communication Technology has become one of the key economic drivers of our technology dependent world. In popular notion, the tech industry or how ICT is often known has become synonymous to all technologies…
Social consensus is important for society. Sometimes the success of society depends on a consensus (e.g. the decision to pay taxes or to commit to the constitution). Examples for continuous opinion dynamics are discussions about tax rates…
We study the ability of a social media platform with a political agenda to influence voting outcomes. Our benchmark is Condorcet's jury theorem, which states that the likelihood of a correct decision under majority voting increases with the…
Every day, we judge the probability of propositions. When we communicate graded confidence (e.g. "I am 90% sure"), we enable others to gauge how much weight to attach to our judgment. Ideally, people should share their judgments to reach…
We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the…
There is much to learn from what Turing hastily dismissed as Lady Lovelace s objection. Digital computers can indeed surprise us. Just like a piece of art, algorithms can be designed in such a way as to lead us to question our understanding…
The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…
Recent philosophical work has explored how the social identity of knowers influences how their contributions are received, assessed, and credited. However, a critical gap remains regarding the role of technology in mediating and enabling…
A recent work by Hern\'andez et al. introduced a networked voting rule supported by a trust-based social network, where indications of possible representatives were based on individuals opinions. Individual contributions went beyond a…