Speaker: Evangelos Pournaras (Leeds)

Title: A `Swiss Army Knife' for Direct Democracy - On Voting Design and AI support for Legitimacy

Abstract: I will introduce in this talk recent findings from real-world settings on how input and aggregation voting methods influence the legitimacy of voting outcomes in collective decision-making processes such as participatory budgeting. I will start by showing how majority vs. preferential input voting methods work under polarized settings such as policies for COVID-19. I will then illustrate how different combinations of input and aggregation voting methods perform in participatory budgeting. I will also demonstrate the experience of trying for first time such a novel combination in real world in the city of Aarau in Switzerland, which involved cumulative voting with the method of equal shares to achieve inclusion, expressiveness, fairness, proportionality and higher representation of citizens’ preferences. I will also provide some insights from my UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project on how decision-support systems based on distributed optimization and multi-agent reinforcement learning can empower radical collective decision-making processes for legitimacy such as consensus-based participatory budgeting.

Bio: Dr. Evangelos Pournaras is Associate Professor in the School of Computing at University of Leeds, where he leads the Distributed Intelligent Social Computing (DISC) lab. He has also been UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, an Alan Turing Fellow and a research associate at UCL Center of Blockchain Technologies. Evangelos' research interests focus on distributed and intelligent social computing systems with expertise in socio-technical domains of Smart Cities. He has more than 5 years of research experience at ETH Zurich after having completed his PhD studies at Delft University of Technology. Evangelos has also been a visiting researcher at EPFL and has industry experience at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Evangelos has won the Augmented Democracy Prize, the 1st prize at ETH Policy Challenge as well as 5 paper awards and honors. He has published more than 90 peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals and conferences. He has raised significant funding and worked for national and EU projects such as H2OforAll, ASSET, SoBigData, and FuturICT 2.0.