The One About AI x Social Sciences
What happens when AI becomes part of our social systems?
From shaping how information flows online to participating in collective decision-making, AI is raising new questions at the intersection of technology and society. Join us as researchers share how they're measuring these phenomena and exploring new paradigms for human-AI collaboration.
More About The Sharings
Emilio Ferrara (Professor, USC) will share on "AI's Impact on the Information Ecosystem"
As generative AI becomes increasingly embedded in online platforms, understanding its impact requires more than anecdotal observations. Emilio will share on their research at the intersection of AI and social media, exploring how computational methods can be used to detect coordinated online manipulation, analyse bot behaviour, and measure the influence of LLMs on the information ecosystem. Drawing on recent studies, he'll discuss the technical challenges of studying these evolving systems and the opportunities for building more robust methods for detection, measurement, and analysis. (Technical Level: 200 - 300)
Joseph Low and Oscar Duys (Co-Founders, Habermolt) will share on "Delegating Deliberation to AI Representatives"
Most collective decisions that affect us are made in rooms we never got a chance to be in. Convening people to deliberate on decisions together is often too slow and too costly. But what if your personal AI agent interviews you to learn your perspectives, then goes on to represent you in a group discussion? Would this help us get to a quicker or better consensus, or do we lose the ability for individual human voices to be heard? Joseph and Oscar will share what they learnt from publicly deploying Habermolt, a platform for AI-delegated deliberation where users can send AI agents to deliberate on their behalf. They will then share their research on the technical challenges of faithfully representing humans and enabling AI agents to deliberate at scale. Most importantly, they will ask how we ensure it is real people being heard, and not just their agents standing in for them. (Technical Level: 100–200)
More About The Speakers
Professor Emilio Ferrara is a Professor of Computer Science and Communication at the University of Southern California (USC), with joint appointments at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and USC Annenberg School for Communication. He is also a Principal Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute and currently serves as a Visiting International Expert at A*STAR. His research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational social science, and network science, with a focus on social bots, coordinated online manipulation, misinformation, and the impact of large language models on online information ecosystems. Emilio has published over 200 research papers in leading venues including Nature Machine Intelligence, PNAS, and Communications of the ACM.
Joseph Low is the Co-Founder of Habermolt and a Senior Software Engineer at Change.org. He is also a contributor to Metagov, where he researches and builds deliberative tooling, public AI, and autonomous organizations. He previously worked across several early-stage ventures in the Web3 space in Singapore and New York, and was the engineering lead of the Public AI Inference Utility. Most recently, he spent three months in Cape Town on the Cooperative AI Research Fellowship, where he began the work that became Habermolt. His current research interests are in collective intelligence and creating ways for communities to govern technology.
Oscar Duys is the Co-Founder of Habermolt and a Senior Software Engineer at Change.org, where he is building a deliberation platform to reduce political polarisation. Before Habermolt, he worked on the University of Cape Town's official AI assistant and completed a BSc Honours in Applied Mathematics, with a thesis that fine-tuned large language models to learn and reason collaboratively. He co-founded Habermolt during the Cooperative AI Research Fellowship in Cape Town, where his interest in getting AI systems to reason together became the starting point for the platform.
More About The Series
AI Wednesdays is Lorong AI’s weekly gathering, bringing together practitioners, researchers and innovators for technical discussions on research insights, product development and engineering practices.
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