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Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
It is important to study how strategic agents can affect the outcome of an election. There has been a long line of research in the computational study of elections on the complexity of manipulative actions such as manipulation and bribery.…
This article explores the role of hackathons for good in building a community of software and hardware developers focused on addressing global SDG challenges. We theorise this movement as computational diplomacy: a decentralised,…
In societal-scale decision-making systems the collective is faced with the problem of ensuring that the derived group decision is in accord with the collective's intention. In modern systems, political institutions have instatiated…
We study proportional representation in the framework of temporal voting with approval ballots. Prior work adapted basic proportional representation concepts -- justified representation (JR), proportional JR (PJR), and extended JR (EJR) --…
Modern democracies face a critical issue of declining citizen participation in decision-making. Online discussion forums are an important avenue for enhancing citizen participation. This thesis proposal 1) identifies the challenges involved…
Designers of online deliberative platforms aim to counter the degrading quality of online debates. Support technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing open avenues for widening the circle of people involved in…
Increasingly taking place in online spaces, modern political conversations are typically perceived to be unproductively affirming -- siloed in so called ``echo chambers'' of exclusively like-minded discussants. Yet, to date we lack…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
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…
We present a novel form of scalable knowledge representation about agents in a simulated democracy, e-polis, where real users respond to social challenges associated with democratic institutions, structured as Smart Spatial Types, a new…
We introduce the vacillating voter model in which each voter consults two neighbors to decide its state, and changes opinion if it disagrees with either neighbor. This irresolution leads to a global bias toward zero magnetization. In…
Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…
Emerging methods for participatory algorithm design have proposed collecting and aggregating individual stakeholder preferences to create algorithmic systems that account for those stakeholders' values. Using algorithmic student assignment…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
In a news recommender system, a reader's preferences change over time. Some preferences drift quite abruptly (short-term preferences), while others change over a longer period of time (long-term preferences). Although the existing news…
The AI alignment problem comprises both technical and normative dimensions. While technical solutions focus on implementing normative constraints in AI systems, the normative problem concerns determining what these constraints should be.…
We investigate the dynamics of the majority-rule opinion formation model when voters experience differential latencies. With this extension, voters that just adopted an opinion go into a latent state during which they are excluded from the…
Online discussion platforms are a vital part of the public discourse in a deliberative democracy. However, how to interpret the outcomes of the discussions on these platforms is often unclear. In this paper, we propose a novel and…