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Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) change the way humans make decisions, the effect of those decisions and who is accountable for decisions made. We must remain vigilant, informed and human-centred as we tackle our deliberations on developing…
Wildfires require governments to communicate under conditions of urgency, uncertainty, and intense public scrutiny, yet such communication now unfolds within a digitally mediated environment shaped by polarization and engagement-based…
Black Lives Matter has been a major force for social change in the US since 2014, with social media playing a core role in the development and proliferation of the movement. The largest protests in US history occurred in late May and early…
With social media penetration deepening among both citizens and political figures, there is a pressing need to understand whether and how political use of major platforms is electorally influential. Particularly, the literature focused on…
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
Existing approaches to estimating politicians' latent positions along specific dimensions often fail when relevant data is limited. We leverage the embedded knowledge in generative large language models (LLMs) to address this challenge and…
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing…
Militaries around the world have long been cognizant of the potential benefits associated with autonomous systems both in the conduct of warfare and in its prevention. This has lead to the declaration by some that this technology will lead…
We investigate feedback mechanisms in political communication by testing whether politicians adapt the sentiment of their messages in response to public engagement. Using over 1.5 million tweets from Members of Parliament in the United…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of…
Potential advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) could have profound implications for how countries research and develop weapons systems, and how militaries deploy those systems on the battlefield. The idea of AI-enabled military…
U.S. presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College, established in 1789, and designed to mitigate potential risks arising from the collusion of large groups of citizens. A statewide winner-take-all popular voting system for…
Ensuring transparency and integrity in political communication on climate change has arguably never been more important than today. Yet we know little about how politicians focus on, talk about, and portray climate change on social media.…
We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show…
Cure Violence is a community violence intervention program that aims to reduce gun violence by mediating conflicts, "treating" high-risk individuals, and changing community norms. Using NYC shootings data from 2006-2023, we assess the…
Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion…
Current cross-platform social media analyses primarily focus on the textual features of posts, often lacking multimodal analysis due to past technical limitations. This study addresses this gap by examining how U.S. legislators in the 118th…
One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population's trust in the electoral system of…
Political expression through social media has already taken root as a form of political participation. Meanwhile, democracy seems to be facing an epidemic of incivility on social media platforms. With this background, online political…