Events Calendar

AI SEMINAR

Speaker: Keith Burghardt,

Talk Title: Understanding the Dynamics of Collective Decisions

Series: AI Seminar

Abstract: In a microscopic setting, humans behave in rich and unexpected ways. In a macroscopic setting, however, distinctive patterns of group behavior emerge, leading researchers to search for an underlying mechanism. The aim of this talk is to analyze the macroscopic patterns of collective decisions in order to discern how group opinions form at the microscopic level. To do so, we first explore the mechanisms that underlie competing ideas using agent-based models (ABMs). We find that simple rules can accurately reconstruct the macroscopic patterns we see in data as diverse as elections and juries. Next, we model collective decision-making in online question and answer boards, and find that a simple individual-level model can capture important features of user behavior, and heuristics appears to predict dynamics with increasing accuracy as the number of answers grow, suggesting information overload undermines collective decisions. Overall, these models reveal two important findings. First, our work begins to untangle how human psychology affects macroscopic behavior: stubbornness, in which users increasingly stick to their latest opinion, is a necessary component in our ABMs to produce the macroscopic patterns we see in many diverse datasets. Furthermore, our models suggest limitations of the wisdom of crowds, in which groups produce better decisions than individuals, in common systems may be undermined by influence and information overload.


Biography: Keith Burghardt is a summer research assistant at ISI under Kristina Lerman studying the collective decisions among users of question and answer boards. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Physics at the University of Maryland, and was recently awarded a Doctorate in Philosophy in Physics from the same university under Michelle Girvan and William Rand. His research has focused on applying statistical mechanics, and other physics-based approaches toward understanding collective social phenomena, including work as diverse as jury decisions, epidemics, and online environments.

No Webcast available


Host: Kristina Lerman

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th fl Large CR (Room 689)

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute