The 1st International Workshop on
Democracy and AI (DemocrAI2022)

Speakers are basically invitation only. But, if you have interest to present your ongoing results or your thoughts, you can submit research abstract by the end of September and can deliver a position talk.

Workshop date

DemocrAI2022: in conjunction with PRICAI2022

Many tools and methodologies are being developed for online-based large-scale crowd collaboration and decision-making to realize new type of democracy. Compared to pre-Internet-era methodologies, they excel at overcoming limitations as may arise from geographical, cultural, religious, and ethnic issues. AI-assisted democracy is particularly promising. It pledges to take full advantage of AI's recourse to massive knowledge bases and 24/7 availability in supporting humans' collaborative activities, helping them to: gather together; share experiences; and come out with new knowledge and skills. Moreover, it is expected that AI technologies will detect and curb aggressive behaviors such as flaming and promulgation of fake news to realize trustful democracy.

Success in AI-based democracy platforms depends on many desiderata including: availability of platforms for democratic decision-making; formal theories of democratic collaboration for attaining smart agents; methodologies to evaluate democratic discussion and decision making; socio-psychological understanding of democracy; identification and resolution of ethical/legal issues around it. Indeed, democracy is a complex process that also involves many spatio-temporal constraints and concurrent activities by a large number of participants. AIs should be smart enough to automatically resolve these issues. To this end, different technologies are being investigated: multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, deep-learning, game theory and mechanism design, argumentation theories, social choice theory, graphical utility models, case-based reasoning, optimization, and predicting and learning methods. A number of applications of AI-based collaboration are foreseeable, including but not limited to: hyper-democracy, smart societies, automated negotiations, decision-making support tools, negotiation support tools, consensus support tools, collaboration tools as well as knowledge discovery and educational learning tools.

The aim of this workshop, hence, is to discuss agent-based methodologies, tools, relevant formal theories, and ethical/legal/socio-psychological issues that push forward the state-of-the-art of crowd collaboration and decision-making. Broadly construed, the following are the topics of interest:

● Technologies and platforms to enhance crowd democratic decision-making.

● Formal theories of democratic social choice and decision-making such as formal argumentation, social choice theory, game theory, mechanism design, etc.

● Group decision-making and wisdom of the crowds.

● Next generation voting and social choice

● Collective intelligence and superminds.

● Multiagent systems and distributed AI to support democracy.

● Sociology and social psychology.

● Ethics, law, and social issues on crowd decision-making.

● Other related topics such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, civic science, etc.

A considerable number of researchers in various sub-communities of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems as well as other communities such as sociology and social psychology are in fact actively working on these issues.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from these communities to learn about each other's approaches to the complex process of AI-empowered democracy, encouraging cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas, to foster long-term research collaborations and engagement in scaling them up to development of large real-life applications.

As detailed above, research on AI-based democracy is highly relevant to some of the key objectives of PRICAI main conference, and this workshop will be an excellent opportunity for researchers and experts who wish to share their preliminary insights and the technical contents of ongoing research on any of the above-stated topics. Workshops in AI venues gearing towards agent-based crowd collaboration and decision-making itself have been very few, as other workshops tend to focus on narrower topics. We therefore believe that this workshop is very important for spurring wider discussions on novel agent-based tools and technologies of crowd collaboration as well as their social implications.

Submission (research abstract only)

Research abstracts (will not publish) : The main aim of research abstracts is to facilitate to exchange recent ideas and knowledges among researchers in timely manner. Research abstracts must be formatted in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) camera-ready style template; see the Springer’s author instructions page for details. Research abstracts (submitted and final) cannot exceed 2 pages (content) + 1 pages (references). Please do not include acknowledgements in submissions due to blind review. Regular papers must be in trouble-free, high-resolution PDF format, using Type 1 or TrueType fonts. Please only use the arabic numbers system (i.e. [1], [3-5], [4-6,9]) for your references. Please also refer to the instructions on how to prepare your paper for blind review. Research abstracts are unpublished.

Review Process and Acceptance Standards

Light review will be done for research abstracts.

Organizing Committee:

Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito (Organizing Co-Chair, Primary Contact Person)

Professor, Kyoto University, Japan.

Prof. Dr. Ryuta Arisaka (Organizing Co-Chair)

Assistant Professor, Kyoto University

Prof. Dr. Rafik Hadfi (Organizing Co-Chair)

Assistant Professor, Kyoto University

Prof. Dr. Takahiro Uchiya (Organizing Co-Chair)

Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan

Prof. Dr. Tokuro Matsuo (Organizing Co-Chair)

Professor, Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, Japan

Prof. Dr. Susumu Ohnuma (Organizeing Co-Chair)

Professor, Hokkaido University, Japan

Prof. Dr. Shun Shiramatsu (Organizing Co-Chair)

Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan