Related papers: Explanatory Publics: Explainability and Democratic…
We propose an explanatory and computational theory of transformative discoveries in science. The theory is derived from a recurring theme found in a diverse range of scientific change, scientific discovery, and knowledge diffusion theories…
Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize social and political life in unpredictable ways, raising questions about the principles that ought to guide its development and regulation. By examining digital advertising and social media…
Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems: crowdsourcing systems, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, citizen science projects, and collaboratively edited…
Deploying AI systems in public institutions can have far-reaching consequences for many people, making it a matter of public interest. Providing opportunities for stakeholders to come together, understand these systems, and debate their…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has huge potential to improve the health and well-being of people, but adoption in clinical practice is still limited. Lack of transparency is identified as one of the main barriers to implementation, as…
Contemporary concerns over the governance of technological systems often run up against narratives about the technical infeasibility of designing mechanisms for accountability. While in recent AI ethics literature these concerns have been…
With the long term accumulation of high quality educational data, artificial intelligence has shown excellent performance in knowledge tracing. However, due to the lack of interpretability and transparency of some algorithms, this approach…
In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual…
Turing's (1936) paper on computable numbers has played its role in underpinning different perspectives on the world of information. On the one hand, it encourages a digital ontology, with a perceived flatness of computational structure…
Recent advancements in AI applications to healthcare have shown incredible promise in surpassing human performance in diagnosis and disease prognosis. With the increasing complexity of AI models, however, concerns regarding their opacity,…
Is a commercial mass media, dependent on the market for its sustenance, necessary, or even desirable, for liberal democracy? Yochai Benkler has argued that a decentralized, peer-to-peer system of communications and information is both…
In the wake of the on-going digital revolution, we will see a dramatic transformation of our economy and most of our societal institutions. While the benefits of this transformation can be massive, there are also tremendous risks to our…
Elections are not the only but arguably one of the most important pillars for the proper functioning of liberal democracies. Recent evidence across the globe shows that it is not straightforward to conduct them in a free and fair manner.…
There is much debate on how public participation and expertise can be brought together in collaborative knowledge environments. One of the experiments addressing the issue directly is Citizendium. In seeking to harvest the strengths (and…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Many powerful computing technologies rely on implicit and explicit data contributions from the public. This dependency suggests a potential source of leverage for the public in its relationship with technology companies: by reducing,…
With humans increasingly serving as computational elements in distributed information processing systems and in consideration of the profit-driven motives and potential inequities that might accompany the emerging thinking economy[1], we…
When language models answer open-ended problems, they implicitly make hidden decisions that shape their outputs, leaving users with uncontextualized answers rather than a working map of the problem; drawing on multiverse analysis from…
Information retrieval (IR) research must understand and contend with the social implications of the technology it produces. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies,…
The distinction between genuine grassroots activism and automated influence operations is collapsing. While contemporary policy debates prioritize fully autonomous generative agents and synthetic content, this paper offers a conceptual…