Related papers: The Mosquito incident and the need-(not-)to-know
During community decision-making and civic collaboration, conflicts can escalate when people suspect misinformation. We introduce the concept of sense of misinformation as experiencing someone's language or behavior as misinformation when…
This paper describes the Spot the Difference Corpus which contains 54 interactions between pairs of subjects interacting to find differences in two very similar scenes. The setup used, the participants' metadata and details about collection…
This paper presents a novel approach to understand specific student behavior in MOOCs. Instructors currently perceive participants only as one homogeneous group. In order to improve learning outcomes, they encourage students to get active…
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…
Curiosity is the strong desire to learn or know more about something or someone. Since learning is often a social endeavor, social dynamics in collaborative learning may inevitably influence curiosity. There is a scarcity of research,…
Communities of practice in science communication can make important contributions to public engagement with science but are under-researched. In this article, we look at the perspectives of a community of practice in astronomy communication…
Swarm dynamics is the study of collections of agents that interact with one another without central control. In natural systems, insects, birds, fish and other large mammals function in larger units to increase the overall fitness of the…
Canary exposure, introduced in Carlini et al. is frequently used to empirically evaluate, or audit, the privacy of machine learning model training. The goal of this note is to provide some intuition on how to interpret canary exposure,…
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…
We investigate a model for a mosquito-borne epidemic in which human hosts may adopt protective behaviour against vector bites in response to information on both past and current disease prevalence. Assuming that mosquitoes can also feed on…
We investigate the problem of a principal looking to contract an expert to provide a probability forecast for a categorical event. We assume all experts have a common public prior on the event's probability, but can form more accurate…
Politicians with large media visibility and social media audiences have a significant influence on public discourse. Consequently, their dissemination of misinformation can have profound implications for society. This study investigated the…
In this work, the spread of a contagious disease on a society where the individuals may take precautions is modeled. The primary assumption is that the infected individuals transmit the infection to the susceptible members of the community…
E-business, information serving, and ubiquitous computing will create heavy request traffic from strangers or even incognitos. Such requests must be managed automatically. Two ways of doing this are well known: giving every incognito…
The massive diffusion of social media fosters disintermediation and changes the way users are informed, the way they process reality, and the way they engage in public debate. The cognitive layer of users and the related social dynamics…
The complexity of science and its frequent lack of accessibility often creates disinterest among the general public. Furthermore, there exists a gap between the public perception of science and the reality of scientific research, which…
As far as human perceptions and rational thinking are concerned, contradictions constitute a non negligible part of our reality. We often refer to these phenomena, in a more informal way, as the chicken or the egg causality dilemma.…
Recently, it was discovered that the `quantum partial information' needed to merge one party's state with another party's state is given by the conditional entropy, which can be negative [Horodecki, Oppenheim, and Winter, Nature 436, 673…
In the era of big data, we continuously - and at times unknowingly - leave behind digital traces, by browsing, sharing, posting, liking, searching, watching, and listening to online content. When aggregated, these digital traces can provide…
One of the most intriguing dynamics in biological systems is the emergence of clustering, the self-organization into separated agglomerations of individuals. Several theories have been developed to explain clustering in, for instance,…