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As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
The ability of a society to make the right decisions on relevant matters relies on its capability to properly aggregate the noisy information spread across the individuals it is made of. In this paper we study the information aggregation…
We compare how well agents aggregate information in two repeated social learning environments. In the first setting agents have access to a public data set. In the second they have access to the same data, and also to the past actions of…
How can we approach the truth in a society? It may depend on various factors. In this paper, using a well-established truth seeking model, we show that the persistent free information flow will bring us to the truth. Here the free…
Science is a fundamental human activity and we trust its results because it has several error-correcting mechanisms. Its is subject to experimental tests that are replicated by independent parts. Given the huge amount of information…
We read newspapers and watch TV every day. There are many issues and many controversies. Since media are free, we can hear arguments from every possible side. How do we decide what is wrong or right? The first condition to accept a message…
Organizational knowledge bases are moving from passive archives to active entities in the flow of people's work. We are seeing machine learning used to enable systems that both collect and surface information as people are working, making…
Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a…
How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…
We consider the problem of a principal who needs to elicit the true worth of an object she owns from an agent who has a unique ability to compute this information. The correctness of the information cannot be verified by the principal, so…
We study distributed knowledge, which is what privately informed agents come to know by communicating freely with one another and sharing everything they know. Knowledge is not necessarily partitional: agents may be boundedly rational and…
A central question of crowd-sourcing is how to elicit expertise from agents. This is even more difficult when answers cannot be directly verified. A key challenge is that sophisticated agents may strategically withhold effort or information…
We consider the problem of the evolution of a code within a structured population of agents. The agents try to maximise their information about their environment by acquiring information from the outputs of other agents in the population. A…
This work studies the learning abilities of agents sharing partial beliefs over social networks. The agents observe data that could have risen from one of several hypotheses and interact locally to decide whether the observations they are…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
Explainable systems expose information about why certain observed effects are happening to the agents interacting with them. We argue that this constitutes a positive flow of information that needs to be specified, verified, and balanced…
A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…
Social learning, a fundamental process through which individuals shape their beliefs and perspectives via observation and interaction with others, is critical for the development of our society and the functioning of social governance.…
In this preprint, we present A collaborative human-AI approach to building an inspectable semantic layer for Agentic AI. AI agents first propose candidate knowledge structures from diverse data sources; domain experts then validate,…
The reporting and the analysis of current events around the globe has expanded from professional, editor-lead journalism all the way to citizen journalism. Nowadays, politicians and other key players enjoy direct access to their audiences…