Related papers: Explanatory Publics: Explainability and Democratic…
This essay argues that a new form of democracy - an "Emergent Democracy" - will develop as a result of the use of Internet communication tools and platforms such as blogs. The essay explores a variety of tools available and explores the…
Inspired by e-participation systems, in this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes drawbacks of existing approaches by allowing users to…
The development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, with their profound societal impacts, raise critical challenges for governance. Historically, technological innovations have been governed by concentrated expertise…
Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various…
Calls for heightened consideration of fairness and accountability in algorithmically-informed public decisions---like taxation, justice, and child protection---are now commonplace. How might designers support such human values? We…
Mathematical models of complex social systems can enrich social scientific theory, inform interventions, and shape policy. From voting behavior to economic inequality and urban development, such models influence decisions that affect…
The social implications of algorithmic decision-making in sensitive contexts have generated lively debates among multiple stakeholders, such as moral and political philosophers, computer scientists, and the public. Yet, the lack of a common…
Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…
The concept of power can be explored at several scales: from physical action and process effectuation, all the way to complex social dynamics. A spectrum-wide analysis of power requires attention to the fundamental principles that constrain…
Participatory budgeting is a democratic approach to deciding the funding of public projects, which has been adopted in many cities across the world. We present a survey of research on participatory budgeting emerging from the computational…
The demands for accurate and representative generative AI systems means there is an increased demand on participatory evaluation structures. While these participatory structures are paramount to to ensure non-dominant values, knowledge and…
We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens…
A recent normative turn in computer science has brought concerns about fairness, bias, and accountability to the core of the field. Yet recent scholarship has warned that much of this technical work treats problematic features of the status…
This paper is preoccupied with the following question: given a (possibly opaque) learning system, how can we understand whether its behaviour adheres to governance constraints? The answer can be quite simple: we just need to "ask" the…
AI has become pervasive in recent years, but state-of-the-art approaches predominantly neglect the need for AI systems to be contestable. Instead, contestability is advocated by AI guidelines (e.g. by the OECD) and regulation of automated…
Public attention towards explainability of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has been rising in recent years to offer methodologies for human oversight. This has translated into the proliferation of research outputs, such as from…
Democratic governments comprise a subset of a population whose goal is to produce coherent decisions, solving societal challenges while respecting the will of the people. New governance frameworks represent this as a social network rather…
This short article introduces the concept of political vulnerability for social media researchers. How are traditional notions of harm challenged by research subjects in politically vulnerable communities? Through a selection of case…
Explainability is one of the key ethical concepts in the design of AI systems. However, attempts to operationalize this concept thus far have tended to focus on approaches such as new software for model interpretability or guidelines with…
The increase of connectivity and the impact it has in every day life is raising new and existing security problems that are becoming important for social good. We introduce two particular problems: cyber attack attribution and regulatory…