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Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…
The world is changing fast, and so is the space sector. Planning for large scientific experiments two decades ahead may no longer be the most sensible approach. I develop the argument that large science experiments are becoming comparable…
With the increasing popularity of social network services, paradigm-shifting has occurred in political communication. Politicians, candidates, and political organizations establish their fan pages to interact with online citizens.…
NASA should design missions to Mars for the purpose of generating "Aha!" discoveries to jolt scientists contemplating the molecular origins of life. These missions should be designed with an understanding of the privileged chemistry that…
Determining the habitability of terrestrial exoplanets is a complex problem that represents the next major step for the astrophysical community. The majority of current models treat these planets as homogeneous or contain heterogeneity that…
This position paper argues that effectively "democratizing AI" requires democratic governance and alignment of AI, and that this is particularly valuable for decisions with systemic societal impacts. Initial steps -- such as Meta's…
The year 1996 will mark the initiation of a number of new space missions to the planet Mars from which we expect to obtain a rich set of data, including spacecraft radio tracking data. Anticipating these events, we have analyzed the…
Mars' wet-to-dry transition is a major environmental catastrophe, yet the spatial pattern, tempo, and cause of drying are poorly constrained. We built a globally-distributed database of constraints on Mars late-stage paleolake size relative…
Digital democracy and new forms for direct digital participation in policy making gain unprecedented momentum. This is particularly the case for preferential voting methods and decision-support systems designed to promote fairer, more…
Since Viking has conducted its life detection experiments on Mars, many missions have enhanced our knowledge about the environmental conditions on the Red Planet. However, the Martian surface chemistry and the Viking lander results remain…
The Swarmathon is a swarm robotics programming challenge that engages college students from minority-serving institutions in NASA's Journey to Mars. Teams compete by programming a group of robots to search for, pick up, and drop off…
We use a hierarchy of numerical models (a 3-D Global Climate Model, a 1-D radiative-convective model and a 2-D Mantle Dynamics model) to explore the environmental effects of very large impacts on the atmosphere, surface and interior of…
We address the possibility that intelligent civilisations that destroy themselves could present signatures observable by humanity. Placing limits on the number of self-destroyed civilisations in the Milky Way has strong implications for the…
This review focuses on recent results in advancing our understanding of the location and distribution of habitable exo-Earth environments. We first review the qualities that define a habitable planet/moon environment. We extend these…
After the successful landing of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, both NASA and ESA initiated a selection process for potential landing sites for the Mars2020 and ExoMars missions, respectively. Two ellipses located in the Mawrth Vallis…
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, intelligent decision-making techniques have gradually surpassed human levels in various human-machine competitions, especially in complex multi-agent cooperative task scenarios.…
For the first time, the Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer (EMIRS) instrument on board the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) "Hope", is providing us with the temperature measurements of Mars at all local times covering most of the planet. As a…
Our Robust, Explainable Autonomy for Scientific Icy Moon Operations (REASIMO) effort contributes to NASA's Concepts for Ocean worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) program, which explores science platform technologies for ocean worlds…
Decide Madrid is the civic technology of Madrid City Council which allows users to create and support online petitions. Despite the initial success, the platform is encountering problems with the growth of petition signing because petitions…
With the irruption of ICTs and the crisis of political representation, many online platforms have been developed with the aim of improving participatory democratic processes. However, regarding platforms for online petitioning, previous…