Information
Aim & Scope
The workshop aims to provide a platform to come into contact with control theories applied toward solving societally relevant problems. Paving the way for control-oriented solutions to social-scale problems, the workshop's key focus areas encompass:
Promoting Fair Decision-Making, examining the challenges and opportunities when establishing fairness in decision-making processes.
Societally-Aware Control, exploring how control theory can be harnessed to craft algorithms and strategies finely tuned to societal values, ethical considerations, and the welfare of individuals navigating (networked) environments.
Opinion dynamics over networks, with a discussion that extends to opinion formation and evolution over time, and looking at how control strategies can adapt to manage these transformations while preserving fairness and societal awareness.
The workshop talks will provide an overview of cutting-edge technical tools that can be leveraged to solve societally relevant problems, showcasing how to apply them in real-world scenarios exploiting actual data. Attendees will have the unique opportunity to understand the methodological keys and challenges of leveraging control theory when human preferences and fairness should be considered in (closed-loop) decision-making.
The talks will be brought together in a final panel discussion allowing attendees to reflect on the (also ethical) implications of applying control theory to cope with societally relevant problems, stimulating new research into socially aware and fair control and potentially fostering new collaborations toward leveraging theories and practices stemming from the control field to tackle pressing issues in our society.
Target audience
The workshop is aimed at graduate students and researchers interested in broadening their knowledge of network control theory and opinion dynamics in tackling societally relevant decision-making problems. Apart from theoretical aspects, the talks will also provide an outlook on their possible application to mobility problems, classical games in economics, and recommender systems. The workshop is intended to expose researchers already working in the field to recent advances and open research directions, engaging them in a wider discussion on the potential benefits and risks of using control theory to benefit society. At the same time, as the topics and frameworks touched by the talks are various but self-contained, the workshop is also intended for researchers who aim to approach these disciplines or exploit network theory and opinion dynamics in their research, having a glance at possible research directions and existing techniques.
Talks
By pairing experienced and young researchers with diverse expertise, the workshop brings together a rather varied group of internationally recognized scientists affiliated with institutions in Europe and the United States of America. Follow here for more details on the talks,.