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A century ago, John Dewey observed that '[s]team and electricity have done more to alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the agencies which affected human relationships before our time'. In the last few decades,…
Technological systems increasingly mediate human information exchange, spanning interactions among humans as well as between humans and artificial agents. The unprecedented scale and reliance on information disseminated through these…
We develop a framework that leverages the smoothed complexity analysis by Spielman and Teng to circumvent paradoxes and impossibility theorems in social choice, motivated by modern applications of social choice powered by AI and ML. For…
In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…
News recommenders help users to find relevant online content and have the potential to fulfill a crucial role in a democratic society, directing the scarce attention of citizens towards the information that is most important to them.…
Information has exploded on the Internet and mobile with the advent of the big data era. In particular, recommendation systems are widely used to help consumers who struggle to select the best products among such a large amount of…
Theoretical work on sequential choice and large-scale experiments in online ranking and voting systems has demonstrated that social influence can have a drastic impact on social and technological systems. Yet, the effect of social influence…
The concept of truth, as a public good is the production of a collective understanding, which emerges from a complex network of social interactions. The recent impact of social networks on shaping the perception of truth in political arena…
The unprecedented availability of large-scale human behavioral data is profoundly changing the world we live in. Researchers, companies, governments, financial institutions, non-governmental organizations and also citizen groups are…
Common knowledge of intentions is crucial to basic social tasks ranging from cooperative hunting to oligopoly collusion, riots, revolutions, and the evolution of social norms and human culture. Yet little is known about how common knowledge…
Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However, a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the…
"Wisdom of crowds" refers to the phenomenon that the average opinion of a group of individuals on a given question can be very close to the true answer. It requires a large group diversity of opinions, but the collective error, the…
Reputation systems are currently used, often with success, to ensure the functioning of online services as well as of e-commerce sites. Despite the relationship between reputation and material cooperative behaviours is quite supported, less…
Unobserved confounding arises when an unmeasured feature influences both the treatment and the outcome, leading to biased causal effect estimates. This issue undermines observational studies in fields like economics, medicine, ecology or…
As technologies are developed and constructed, designers may or may not be aware that they are embedding politics and values into their artifacts. Computer scientists operate and advance their field by building layers of abstraction into…
No man is an island, as individuals interact and influence one another daily in our society. When social influence takes place in experiments on a population of interconnected individuals, the treatment on a unit may affect the outcomes of…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
In the process of enacting or introducing a new policy, policymakers frequently consider the population's responses. These considerations are critical for effective governance. There are numerous methods to gauge the ground sentiment from a…
Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…