Online crowd-based platforms are currently driving the creation of new forms of democracy. These new platforms are primarily designed to address the limitations caused by geographical, cultural, religious, and ethnic divides. AI-assisted democracy is a promising idea that pledges to fully take advantage of AI's capabilities in supporting humans' collaborative activities, gathering, sharing, and finding solutions to wicked problems that humanity is currently facing.

The success of AI-based democracy depends on many criteria, such as the availability of online platforms for democratic decision-making; the research on formal theories of democratic collaboration; the methodologies to evaluate democratic deliberation; the existence of a socio-psychological understanding of democracy; and the identification of the ethical and legal issues surrounding the integration of AI in society. Such processes are complex and often involve various epistemic constraints along the concurrent activities of the stakeholders. Given the premise that AI systems should be, in principle, smart enough to alleviate these issues, various technologies could be combined to this end, including multiagent systems, machine learning, game theory, mechanism design, argumentation theories, computational social choice theory, preference elicitation, case-based reasoning, and so forth.

The 4th International Workshop on Democracy and AI (DemocrAI 2024) investigates different pathways to democracy using agent-based methodologies and tools, relevant formal theories, and ethical, legal, and socio-psychological insights on democracy and its future. The topics of the workshop can be summarized as follows:

• Technologies and Platforms for Group Decision-Making

• Theories of Decision-Making, such as Argumentation, Game Theory, Social Choice, and Mechanism Design

• Multiagent Systems, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, and Distributed Ledgers

• Wisdom of the Crowds, Collective Intelligence, and Superminds

• Liquid, Digital, Cyber, Hyper, and Augmented Forms of Democracy

• Social Choice Theory and Computational Social Choice

• Social Science, Sociology, and Social Psychology

• Ethical, Legal, and Societal Issues in Collective Decision-Making

• Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, and Human-Based Computation

• The Sustainable Development Goals or Global Goals and Artificial Intelligence

Researchers in various AI communities, autonomous agents, multiagent systems, and sociology and social psychology are actively working on these issues. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from these communities to learn about each other's approaches to AI-empowered democracy, encourage the cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas, and foster long-term research collaborations and engagement in implementing real-world applications.

The research on AI-based democracy is highly relevant to some of the critical objectives of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) community. DemocrAI 2024 will be an excellent opportunity for researchers and experts who wish to share their preliminary insights on workshop topics. More workshops in AI venues need to be geared toward agent-based crowd decision-making, as most workshops focus on narrower topics in AI. Our workshop is paramount to spurring broader discussions on novel agent-based tools and technologies of crowd collaboration and their social implications. The last IJCAI edition of the workshop (DemocrAI 2023) can be found here.