Hybrid Intelligence for high quality large scale deliberation

all right
let me share my screen
okay so well thank you for the
introduction luciano
welcome everyone today as we have said
we're going to talk about high quality
online deliberation using hybrid
intelligence
but uh and well me and my colleague hill
but well this title sounds pretty boring
and
it's just after lunch so let me start
off instead with
a bit more of a clickbait title and let
me say
let me start with the title instead of
social media are bad
you probably have heard about this you
probably you know are on social media
you know
how bad they are probably even your mom
told you that social media are bad
but today i want to try we want to try
to give you a little bit of a different
angle explain you another
way in which social media bet social
media are bad
to read the wisdom of the crowd so the
wisdom of the crowd is essentially
the opposite of the expert's opinion as
in
it is what what people what lay people
or the group of lay people thinks about
a certain
topic for example if we talk about
lockdown measures
as you may be maybe familiar with
there is on one side there is the
expert's opinion and on the other side
there is the wisdom of the crowd what
the population what the citizens think
about it now um
three key components for having a true
real proper
reading of the wisdom of the crowd are
diversity equality and independence
and none of these is actually present on
social media so let me quickly go
through it
so diversity diversity means that
this the population needs to be well
diverse the name says it
there needs to be different different
people with different backgrounds
with different opinions and this is not
present on social networks because
social networks create
the so-called filter bubbles you may be
aware of that
essentially social networks friend
suggestions and algorithm
make sure suggest friends that have
similar interests to yours and that
and that means that around you you
create a local network of contacts that
share similar interests and that means
that diversity is actually
low there's no equality equality means
that
everybody's voice has the same weight
and this thing is also not present on
social media because you have
influencers
you have people who have lots of
contacts whose voice is heard much more
than other people who
with way fewer contacts
and last independence independence on
social media
is more of a social social dynamic that
happens
where so independence means that
our voice should not be biased by
anybody's else's voice
and this doesn't happen also on social
media because
what usually typically does typically
happens also according to several
experiments
is that what we write what we say on
social media
is actually biased by what has been said
so far for example on comments because
we want to try to fit
in the crowd we don't want to stay out
of the
centers out of the bikes so not only
these three factors
are not present on social media but the
main point is that
these three factors are actually
discouraged on social media they're
actually
not promoted on social media and this
means that
reading social media to get the feeling
of what a population thinks about a
certain topic
is not really the best way so what is
the best way then
well the best way accord there's you
know you may think about voting you may
think about referenda
but according to us the best way is
deliberation
so deliberation is happens when
a group of people sits virtually or
physically around the table
and discusses a certain topic with um
with the idea that people have to give
arguments in favor or against
certain certain opinions or certain
decisions
by rationally thinking about it so
participants are invited to rationally
think about their argument to rationally
think about
other participants arguments with the
final goal of
essentially making a common decision or
at least
having a proper rational discussion
about a certain topic
now uh deliberation in particular uh
by the way in which it is conducted
emphasizes
content creation everybody is pushed to
say what they think
it emphasizes reasoning everybody is
pushed to
reason about what they think and to
properly structure their arguments and
not just
throw things over there and then it
emphasizes also inclusivity meaning that
these deliberation groups are typically
done
at least according to theory they are
done in a very diverse way where
everybody
where all types of backgrounds are
involved and asked to
give their opinion social media
essentially promotes exactly the
opposite social media promotes
clicks right so content consumption
sensational contents and these local
networks where
sort of create an echo chamber for this
sensational content so um
and the point is that deliberation so
the liberation sounds very good
right sounds like on paper sounds very
good
but the liberation is not just on paper
the liberation and also the liberation
is not just
what you think that ancient greece
looked like but the liberation
is actually used also in the modern
society
you may be aware that a couple of years
ago
abortion was legalized in ireland
and the uh but the policymakers were a
little bit unsure
whether to propose the referendum for
legalizing abortion
because of the because of the
conservativism of the irish society
so in order to investigate whether it
was the right moment to propose such a
such a referendum they created a
deliberate deliberation groups so they
invited
citizens with diverse backgrounds to
discuss together to put out their
arguments to
to get informed also during the process
obviously
about this about abortion about the pros
and cons
and after these sessions of deliberation
the irish government essentially felt
motivated and felt justified in
proposing this referendum
referendum passed with a resounding yes
abortion was legalized and
by asking uh by asking it during the
exit polls
citizens were were well aware about what
happened
and the fact that this deliberation had
happened pushed them to inform
themselves about the deliberations and
about abortion
so this created on one hand it created
let's say a justification for the
actions of the policy makers
but on the other hand it created more
information and more empowerment
in the citizens because they felt that
their voice could
really be heard and that the government
did something because they heard the
voice of the citizens
so this is at the basis of deliberative
democracy it's uh
i'm not going to go here in details
about that but it's
this idea of hearing the voice of the
people
and at the same time having people
feeling empowered
and informed is very very
important however what
has been done in ireland especially was
with just a few hundred
maybe a thousand participants but not
more than that in order to really
have proper deliberation
according to us almost all the
population should be involved
as many participants as possible should
be involved so that
all voices literally all voices can be
heard
but that is very difficult to do of
course when you have
when you have these physical
deliberations
you cannot you cannot ask millions of
people to physically participate to
these deliberations
so how do we take what's good in the
liberation
and scale it up to a population white
sample but my colleague is going to
answer this question
yeah let me uh take over the slides then
all right you guys should be able to see
my uh
presentation now here we go
all right yeah so uh we talked a little
bit about deliberation
and about uh so we want to scale it up
right
what i what we exactly mean with scaling
we'll get to in a minute
but we have a couple of ideas on how to
get there and
uh we're also inspired by some of the
the things that do work well on social
media
uh as i will also later show not all
social media is bad
to kind of uh contradict the the
clickbait title perhaps
um and and to make it a little bit more
concrete
is that we're talking about either
liberation uh that is ai supported
and text-based so those are the three
uh uh the the three things that you see
here on your screen
um so first off we would like to
use ai in some sort of way we think ai
provides us with a prime tool to kind of
help us scale up the uh deliberation to
more participants
uh making sure that everyone is included
and that these deliberative ideals
as we saw with the that are required for
the wisdom of the crowd for instance
that they are preserved uh so online for
instance like enrico said it removes
this restriction to physically come
together
but also having a video call with like a
million people is not a really good idea
so
um you should have a different way of
communicating and
for this we make the assumption of of
making it text-based
um you could say also for yeah for four
discussions you
do want to have it face-to-face uh there
is of course a difference
but even on uh social media as it is now
there is already
a discussion happening right and there
is already some sort of discussion going
on
so we're looking to kind of amplify that
and insert some deliberative qualities
into that discussion
and take it from there all right
so we talked about scaling and uh
you know us as a computer scientist when
we talk about scaling we talk about
compute power
so uh when we talk about scaling up we
say all right i'm gonna trade in my
little computer for a bigger computer
or we talk about scaling out which is
actually buying more computers
but in the deliberation we have a
slightly different different way of
talking
about it so in a deliberation we kind of
when we say scaling up we mean we add
more participants to a single
deliberation
so first there's where's my mouse
first there's two guys talking then
there's a couple of guys talking
eventually there's the entire group well
i don't know i don't know how many
people there are but like
10 or something but we would like to
increase this to i don't know
a thousand or above you know
of course when you do this a problem a
couple of problems pop up
so deliberation should be on a specific
topic or it should discuss a
specific problem like the the case in
ireland it was abortion
as soon as you increase the number of
participants
you become if you have ever been part of
an internet discussion
you might run into the problem that
people tend to go off topic so it's
really
a problem that you should force people
to to actually discuss the matter that
is at hand
um and the other problem is that well
actually as a single person in this
deliberation you don't get the the
feeling that you're hurt anymore you
don't get the feeling that you're
you're whatever you you put out there is
having an impact
uh which is something that we would like
to prevent
so that was scaling up and the scaling
out is actually
uh besides adding more participants to a
single deliberation is having more
deliberations so
this way we can address multiple topics
uh
you know you can have one deliberation
in the morning and deliberation
at lunch and a deliberation in the
afternoon
with a bunch of different people but of
course as you're having more
more deliberations it becomes
increasingly difficult to keep track of
you know what arguments that was i was
using there and and how far along in the
discussion was i
in another deliberation uh so it becomes
really difficult to keep track of where
you're
where you're at and also this this
scaling out
again it shows a really a really big
problem with
physical and synchronous deliberations
right so you can no longer
organize so many deliberations all the
time that are that are happening
somewhere
you need some kind of online platform to
do this
all right so uh next up we were thinking
about okay so
uh in in scaling up this deliberation
what are the steps that we need to take
to to help humans
so how do we inform them how do we you
know help
actively uh produce something that they
can use in in
in this deliberation and the first
problem that we
are starting to address is the uh
recording of progress
so like i just said uh keeping track of
where you are
or where you have lost in left off in a
certain deliberation
or where others have left off for you to
continue with
is kind of a key component of of our
approach
and furthermore once you have this uh
record of progress uh you can also use
this this record to do other things
things like the analysis of the content
that there is or some kind of meta
analysis
of the progress that is being made
it could also potentially help with
external communication so let's say
you have a bunch of meetings during the
day and you need to provide a report of
those meetings
to a supervisor you basically look back
through the records that you have uh
which are ideally automatically
summarized for you
um as uh based on the minutes that are
there
so the this is the type of thing that we
envisioned to be there
and ideally this this should be
automated and should
potentially also be personalized uh so
personalized in this case means um how
do i
for a specific person what is the most
beneficial way to help that person
and we'll come to a small example or
we'll discuss this further a little bit
when we're talking about values in
enrique's part again
and lastly there's the the case of
facilitation or moderation
in the deliberation uh like i also
mentioned before the
uh people tend to get off topic uh
when there's a lot of people
participating in the discussion
so you need a method for keeping people
on topic or or
asking people who did not have their say
yet or
some way to kind of you know bring
everyone around the table make sure that
everyone is participating
it's also so in some ways you need to
kind of facilitate or or moderate this
and yeah so we kind of in in the broad
scheme of things we think of this
as a couple of steps that could help
people in the deliberation
but really as a core component is this
we
recording of progress and we do that
through
the deliberation map as we call it and
so next to this being
a record of progress it is also
in the future we would like to be able
to reason over it so these meta analyses
that i talked about
so we would like to also include those
from there
um i should point out so the
deliberation map is is a map so it's
basically containing content
that is deliberative and what is nice is
that the deliberative content should be
reasoned so it should contain arguments
and it should contain
uh problems that people address and it
should contain
the way they think about it and and
that's really the kind of strength that
we're striving towards so we're trying
to make use of these ideals that there
are in deliberation
uh for uh
structuring a discussion that's going on
um
and ideally we would like to do so
autonomously
but we'll see if we get there um
yeah so of course we're not the first so
there's uh
some examples of uh these deliberation
maps or
deliberation approaches so right now
you're looking at one this is the
deliberatorium from mark klein
and um it's a little bit overwhelming
because there's a lot of buttons and a
lot of stuff going on but what is really
nice about the example what i wanted to
show you is that
it's focused around finding pros and
cons so it's focused around
representing the um you know the key
points or the
the key content that is being discussed
here
um and then there's a bunch of options
like voting or inserting new ids
or so it's really really difficult to
navigate and it's really hard also at
adverse glance to kind of see what is
over there but i can tell you that the
content that is in here is really nice
so the content in here is really really
well structured
um so i mean social media is not all
that bad because what social media is
good at
is kind of providing a an intuitive way
to
to interact with other people right uh i
mean
everyone has used twitter um even
difficult things like uh communicating
in reply threads and and
kind of traversing this tree it it is
quite difficult but
people still manage and actually people
tend to produce pretty
uh intricate uh reply structures like
one person replying to another and then
another person replying to him well you
see people here
just tend to get sidetracked in the
entire different conversation
almost but it shows that discussions are
happening
and even these discussions you can kind
of map them out
but what it doesn't show you is the
content that is there right so you don't
know
uh you know what these people are
talking about you don't know why they're
disconnected from other people
um what problems are they raising what
arguments are they making
so this is largely still not not found
out yet
and that is the type of information that
we would like to actually contain
in our deliberation map
so so now that we kind of
saw what we want from this deliberation
map we were thinking okay so we need a
method to fill this
we need the method to fill the
liberation map
um and i talked before also about it
being autonomous
but there's also a nice part
that i can say now which is about hybrid
intelligence so
both enrique and i we are connected to
the hybrid intelligence center which is
uh like also uh luciano talked about
it's
radical grant from nwo and
as a model they have augmenting human
intellect so it's really not about
replacing humans but it's about
working alongside humans using ai as a
partner
to kind of increase what humans can do
so take the best from humans take the
best of computers
and really bring them together to move
forward
and why i mean for me
at least the y is really really obvious
because there's the promise that it's
both better for efficiency so you're
both able to faster
come to more accurate
decisions that are made you know
combining the two strengths the
computational strength and the intuitive
human side of things
but next to it there's also trust so um
once you have an uh especially when when
you're in a discussion
you want to be able to use a platform
that you can trust uh
and if especially if there's
autonomously your ideas are kind of
mapped for you in some kind of structure
you need to make sure that you have some
kind of control over it but you also
trust that the ai is doing what you want
it to do
um well his provides some kind of
way in to to structure this to reason
about it
and it does it does so through four
different research pillars
which are the the care pillars so care
stands for collaborative
adaptive responsible and explainable
and i would like to highlight for
instance explainable so you could say
well explainability what does it mean
it means that an ai algorithm has to
explain why it came up with a certain
decision
so why did you use my argument and why
did you insert it here at this point in
the map
well we would actually like to also show
that entire process of the ai making
that
that choice um so you would be able to
kind of verify
and trust what is going on there
um yeah so and on top of that
uh it also again provides a feedback
loop to the human so you would be able
to kind of look at the processor so why
did the ai think
uh i meant to say the argument
that i was making there so what did they
i think of that and
uh kind of reinforce your own idea of
what you're what you're saying
um yeah so i think at this point
is where we have uh oh wait yeah so
almost
um so we talked about
the how to help the scaling up of a
deliberation
how to help people in making sure that
we can scale up
right some of the examples of the
deliberation mapping itself and
the method that we wish to use but we
didn't talk about what we want the
deliberation map to contain
but before we go there i think we will
take some time to take a couple of
questions if there are any
great thanks michelle so far thanks
enrico uh
yeah do we have questions please you can
raise your hand
here on virtually speaking so that yeah
um
okay we have one uh ufo
okay you please correct me if i'm
pronouncing your name wrong so but you
have the floor if you want to turn on
your camera if you want or just or just
speak
please sure hi thanks for the talk
i'm audre welcher from the web
information systems
uh what was a little unclear to me was
about
what goal you were trying to optimize
for so i understand
the different needs that deliberation
can
generally serve i was wondering whether
you're trying to optimize
for say a deliberation that can inform
policy change
uh for example or is it the process of
deliberation itself that you're looking
at and i think this is
a pertinent question because this would
then determine what the metrics
that uh would evaluate your framework
would be right
could you say something about that
yeah so i like the i like the
mathematical approach of it
of this question um so we do not have
yet
any optimization in mind the idea is to
build a
platform that allows for the tools
allows for
tools for moderation tools for example
that
can be then employed and optimized for
different purposes
so one can be for example to increase
participation so to make sure that all
users
give their opinion one could be to
increase
diversity of red opinion so
it could be for example exposing
participants to
something that is actually opposite to
what they believe in
to see how this could increase their for
example acceptance or their belief in
different opinions so we do not have
anything specific in mind but
as i said the idea is to create the
tools for them optimizing
as you prefer okay
so while you're building the if i may
just follow up very quickly so while
you're building these tools right
you uh as you mentioned you probably
would want to support
certain functionalities which are hard
to achieve
in their absence you just mentioned how
uh providing a voice for every
participant is one of those aspects so
i think eventually that's essentially
what you would want to evaluate right
to check whether your proposed solution
is effective or not so i guess there you
have a handful of
ideals as you uh called them earlier
that you would look at so is that
what uh you would eventually evaluate
then yeah
those are part of this this kind of uh
toolbox as anything
puts it right so there's a
there's also a number of theories of
these yeah like like we said these
deliberative ideals so there's a bunch
of them
and different also when talk when
discussing this platform there's
a different kind of design
characteristics that you can
employ and that have a different impact
on each of these ideals right
um and what is also unclear is the
interaction between them
so uh what if i increase the the
strictness of moderation you know
how does it affect all of these
different ideas that are there so that
interaction is completely unknown so
this is because it's
relatively new and especially to do this
online is people don't know about it yet
but it's it would be nice to kind of um
you know we're starting to build this
from the ground up and as we go along
we'd like to
you know put some products and make some
experiments here and there to kind of
see
to get a feel for what the interaction
would be like sure
that is the the main idea yeah that's
interesting uh
if one final comment just to uh share
this view with you and then get out of
here
to let others get a chance as well uh so
in our group we're working a little bit
on trying to understand collective
action as well in crowd computing
communities so
think of online labor uh mechanical turk
so on and so forth
and i think you could probably rely on
such platforms to
try and understand team dynamics and you
know perhaps some of the other
ideals that you can quickly
operationalize in into an experimental
framework
uh you know to try and understand how uh
different features that you might want
to build within tools can
actually play a role in you know
bringing these
ideals to the fore within your
deliberation uh
we can chat offline more about this but
yeah yeah yeah definitely
yeah definitely just send us an email we
should definitely talk about that
cool thank you cheers thank you thanks
super interesting discussion thank you
uh lou
you have uh you have a question you
wanna
yes yeah it's it's kind of in line with
uh with uh
questions and recommendations i think um
i got
a little bit lost towards the end to
what the actual problems are that you're
trying to
um uh trying to address um
and i got i have a better idea now after
your answers to who you are so it's like
it's a really
fascinating uh project that you're
setting up
but i would really like maybe the
question would be like what what's like
a really small practical problem that
you think
is possible to solve or that's maybe
that you would typically do
like in in a physical presence with a
group of people
and how would you translate that uh to
an online environment and then
um plus one and what we all said about
um
you know that there's lots of um
experimenting over under like really
interesting communities like uh
the mechanical turk workers uh there's a
couple of people there that i could
also put you in touch with that have
been doing this kind of work for uh
for a long time like how to organize
workers online and make sure that they
they can align on certain issues
um in a fairly distributed way so that's
i guess my question for you like i'm
happy to help they're offline like
offline but
my question is like do you have a couple
of like really practical small problems
in mind or is that maybe a next step for
your
for your research i mean that is uh
what we'll get to in the second part of
our presentation as well
so thanks for the question because it
nicely gives us a segue maybe
but um so we kind of uh viewed this as
or at least as how i understand it is we
kind of took a couple of these ideals
and we kind of zoomed in on them um
for instance what i'm zooming in on is
so i put it down here as perspectives
but what it's really about is about
arguments so i'm really looking closely
about the reasoning that people do
what arguments are they raising uh also
kind of looking at what what is
available in ai right so
uh how far along is is natural language
processing how far along is argument
mining
uh to what degree can we use what is
there reliably
and uh but that's really zooming in on
only like one of these ideals
so that's just zooming in on reasoning
so for me
that is how i make it practical and how
i
kind of tend to scope it off uh i don't
know about
if enrique has a similar uh yeah i think
i think
to to answer your question one idea
practical idea that we have
is for example what happens if we
create live this deliberation map how
does this
and the participants can see this
deliberation map containing the
arguments that are put
pro or against a certain topic of
discussion how does this influence
the the discussion is the discussion
going to for example converge and be
and have less repetitions simply uh is
it going to actually produce
more arguments simply because you know
there's no repetition so this uh
for example a simple first step
and what mimi he'll especially work on
is the
creation of this deliberation map so how
do we create these in
autonomous hybrid intelligence ways
all right thanks yeah i think like what
might help is to
maybe like because this i think there
are
plenty of organizations a lot of online
deliberation of course happens on social
media platforms so we don't really have
access to understand like
what they how they like that don't do
much of it and there's not
not a lot of collaboration um but it
might be interesting to see if there are
um also policy makers who are thinking
about like what
we want to see and that might be a good
way to kind of
put emphasis on because like these are
very practical very urgent questions
but they're super scientific as well
because they're yeah it's never been
done before so
that's just uh encouragement is to see
see if you can seek maybe partnerships
because
you're setting it up as a big big thing
like try to find partners who can help
you kind of make it um
more specific because it will still be a
highly uh scientific
endeavor right we are we are
yeah we are collaborating with nick
mauter and the
pve people participatory value
evaluation
so we're work we're using their data
we're
helping them and then you know as
luciano included
have ideas to you know make them
scale scaled long i'm not sure like
which direction of scaling this would be
but anyway um
so we're already working with them and
yeah we can talk also
we can go in details about those ideas
yeah yeah
it's indeed a challenge right how to
combine that this is the level
abstraction that you can allow you to
generalize and face different projects
but at the same time be
concrete to have some more uh down to
earth kind of solutions it's always
challenging and yeah i had a question
for you myself but i will keep it to the
end because i think that's a very
smooth transition for you so
i think maybe you can continue with the
with the slides and then we can open up
for questions again later on
sure yeah okay all right
so um back to our deliberation map
and the the content that we want to
store
inside of it so there's two things that
enrique and i are working on so the
first is perspectives
that's well the title of my research and
the second one is
our personal values and eric will tell
you later more about the second one but
first
a little bit about perspectives so um
the the word in itself perspective it's
many it has many interpretations but the
one that i
choose to use here is the one of
perspective taking
so the actively contemplating other
psychological experiences
uh so informally it's like putting on
your social classes and
kind of look at the discussion actively
place yourself
in another person's mindset and and look
at how that person might be
viewing the discussion or might be kind
of weighing off its options um
so this this perspective taking is a
significant mental effort
um but it has been shown to increase
reciprocity and empathy
and all these again so these these
relate back to the deliberative ideals
that there are
um and um if if you get
everyone to do this and also uh to to
make sure that they provide their own
perspective so
people should really be or not really
forced but encouraged
to to uh provide their perspective
on on the topic that's being discussed
um you you will start to find these
these problems and criteria and
solutions that
you didn't know about beforehand so
these uh specifically one thing that
enrico mentioned was this uh
independence so that you look uh at what
the other people think before you give
your opinion and you
just you're being a little bit uh
related to what the other people think
but if you're
like one step ahead of that um you you
will find out what these these criteria
are that people actually worry about
privately
um and it's highly related to the the
also the the reasoning ideal
so the uh in in also providing their
perspective
these people they should be uh
to a high degree uh providing arguments
and providing
uh you know why are they making
conclusions and um
you know specify all of this and the way
we then look for these perspectives or
how i plan to look for these
perspectives is
basically by asking uh who says what
and uh the what in this case are
arguments
so i'm trying to make it really concrete
where arguments are kind of the reason
for having a certain opinion
and you would think maybe this is easy
but actually it's not
so in the simple case you a person is
perfectly straightforward in
uh giving his or her argument but in
reality it's really complex
uh there's a lot of you know implicit
information be
also being captured in the in the
arguments uh
here there's uh uh for the first two
lines so any doctor who tells an
individual patient
that all vaccines are safe and effective
is lazily parroting the cdc
so in this especially in the words
lazily parroting right so there's an
implicit meaning that
a computer might not be able to tell
kind of right off the bat
um but next so next to this implicit
meaning
just even finding the arguments and
finding the entailment between arguments
and conclusion
uh and finding their interaction is
already really difficult
so um so that is kind of what
what for now what i'm focusing on and
also what i answered to
to ruiz i'm kind of taking this uh
reasoning ideal and trying to zoom in on
it and really
try to get to the core problem that is
there and see how far along ai
is and and see whether we can actually
use that in the
the broader scope of deliberation
um so this is about the what so next up
there is also the the the who
so the who is a i mean it's uh related
so who is having the argument who
is stating it um uh
what other parties or stakeholders are
they mentioning
so i realized here the the other
stakeholders that are being mentioned
and you get into complicated cases where
there's also embedded
embedded evidence or embedded statements
or
this very epistemological kind of
logical like what you think that he
thinks that he says
kind of cases so that's a it's a really
complex topic but
i'm trying to um i mean i can if there
are questions i can go into a little bit
more detail but i try to keep it on a
high level for now
um yeah so
i mean when it boils down to it it's
very linguistical challenge um
and also like a before we also wish to
use
hi for this so make it hybrid so really
rely on the human intuition to make
the decision where it matters but also
employ ai for the
the straightforward computations um
yes enrico yeah i think you're up i can
uh yeah i can just
uh again um
right so perspectives are who says what
and values are why do people say
something
to keep it simple so values are the
abstract drivers that are behind
our opinions and our actions and our and
our beliefs
so um what you see over here on the
right is an example of personal values
and this is an example of basic values
so these values are general values that
have been found
throughout the research and
and essentially these are the
motivations for our opinions for our
actions but as you can see here these
values
at least we believe that these values
are a little bit too
general a little bit too generic such as
self-direction or achievement and they
are very difficult to
connect to everyday situations and that
is why we want instead to use
context-specific values so
context-specific values are instead sort
of the other side of the coin
and they are defined within a context
then applicable to a context so let me
let me make a couple of examples so um
let's take the example of
physical safety this value this value is
very important in the context of
lockdown measures because
people have people take actions based on
the motivation
based on the driver of physical safety
as opposed to others who
for example do it based on freedom
so it is a value that is applicable to
the context of lockdown measures
but it is for example not applicable to
the context of regulating financial
markets
arguably however the very same
value of physical safety can take
different forms in different contexts so
let's say that if we talk about
physical safety in the context of
lockdown measures then we talk about
maintaining distance we talk about
wearing face masks but if we talk about
about the same value physical safety in
the context of driving
then we think about wearing safety belts
we think about respecting speed limits
and signs
now these two are essentially from a
natural point of view they're the same
value but they take different flavors
different forms
in different contexts and if we want to
concretely talk
or if we want to concretely design and
talk about a specific
value in a specific context well we
believe that we should use the context
specific value
so let's make for example if we want to
create an
agent that throughout your day helps you
in
increasing your your physical safety
well that agent
should not suggest you to wear a face
mask
while you're driving in order to
increase your physical safety that would
not make sense
the agent needs to understand the
context where the value is located in
and that these values are different
so uh well the problem is that if we
talk about the context-specific values
the first step is then
well finding out which values are
relevant to a specific context when
we're talking
and in order to do this this was the
first step of my phd
meme here luciano and some other
colleagues developed a methodology a
hybrid intelligence methodology
for uh identifying the values that are
relevant to a specific context
so i essentially using human intuition
and supported by
artificial intelligence i i'm not going
to go in detail but
you can contact me for additional
details
and once we have identified which values
are relevant to a context
we can use those values essentially as a
language as
as a language of communication to
interpret what people are saying or are
trying to say
so um instead of having
deliberation participants communicate
through their text
purely through their text we can sort of
filter this text and using a transparent
box i'll get to that in a moment
we can instead to the listeners we can
give
the comment that the actual person gave
and the perspective
the values that that person
holds with that comment the idea is that
if we give a better interpretation of
what people are saying or are trying to
say
the on the listener side hopefully
there's going to be a better
understanding of different opinion and
there's going to be a
calmer discussion instead of just you
know rushing to thinking that
well that person must be stupid because
well she thinks
differently from me so she must be
stupid so hopefully
we if we have a better if we give a
better detailing of what is said
in this additional abstract level like
perspective well some more concrete
perspective and
abstract values levels that would be a
better understanding
of this conversation and as we say as
mikiel mentioned earlier
all of these should be done in a
transparent manner this algorithm that
interprets
these comments that finds the
perspectives and finds the values
should be as transparent as possible
users participants should have control
over what the algorithm
thinks about what they say in this way
if they have some meaningful control
over this algorithm they will build
trust in it
and they will be able to sort of use
this platform to discuss and hopefully
have a better informed
and civilized discussion about topics
so essentially this is our this is well
one of our final goals to attach to one
of the questions
from earlier and well we're gonna get
there
at a certain point so that was uh that
was the
that was the presentation and yeah just
ask some more questions
luciano you said you had one cool so
thanks indigo thanks michael that was
really interesting
and yeah let me just add one comment
a small comment before that the this
work he mentioned was really so
on the it's called axis right it was
accepted for amaz
two thousand 2000 2021 and
and it deals like with two different
contexts one of the concepts of energy
transition
another one of the relaxation of covid
measures together with the group from
yeah
midnight malta some other people at the
tpm on the participatory value
evaluation so
definitely as soon as out i recommend is
interesting
and we are also trying to understand not
which are the values and there's another
work we are also trying to
to see how how much each individual care
about each value so a little bit where
something so uh on my question is
you you mentioned on the earlier
presentation
about uh deliberation being a
way of rational discussion so to
bring rational arguments but it comes
it's like
we are messy let's not call irrational
but
at least boundedly rational human beings
and i i just want to say how do you
you have some ideas to reconcile this
because if you want to see
only rational arguments but we are not
always rational on the way we propose or
arguments there's a lot of emotions
there's there are feelings there maybe
the connection even to values that we
can say is that really rational or not
so
just you have some ideas on that aspect
yeah so there i mean the uh this this
feeling of the deliberation map right so
we gave perspectives and and values now
as a
a kind of way to fill it but those are
kind of uh um examples
maybe perhaps of things that you could
put in this
uh this map and what we're trying to do
is we're trying to get to a point where
we say all right so
the technology that we employ here or
the ai or hi or however
you extract the perspectives or values
we get it to a point where we can work
with it and we can kind of on a high
level
use it for for helping people in a
deliberation
um but next to it there might be many
more
there might be many other types of
information you can strike
things like sentiment things like
emotion things like you know all these
different
aspects of what people are saying you
could uh
i mean for now also the the idea that we
have for the representation of this map
it allows for these different uh types
of information to be included and and
actually persist next to the
perspectives and values that we
mentioned for now
um and i mean while i'm looking at so i
mean you're writing saying well i'm
trying to look at this rationality and
i'm kind of saying well
it's so i i'm hoping it's going to be a
self-reinforcing loop right so i'm
trying to look at the liberation as
there should be rational discussion
going on so i then
present to you the rest of the
discussions should be become even more
rational right
but it doesn't mean that i kind of
ignore all the other
stuff that is there but it's just one
way of scoping off the project for
now but if it turns out that it's really
difficult to do or
i kind of lose people during the process
then
you need to critically look and say well
maybe the the rationality
constraints that we have for now are too
strict so let's broaden up a little bit
let's maybe go
one step lower uh in in trying to to
model it or trying to
extract what people think or how they
think
and maybe shift a little bit in in what
we exactly mean with
uh with the perspective for instance
yeah okay
nice if you think thank you very much i
think that clarifies a lot and
i mean is i i do believe that uh
this combination of human and ai that is
really the way to go for these kind of
topics and issues that you can still
have the goal of achieving rationality
but still including everyone
along the way right okay uh does someone
has
and any questions right now can you
can you raise your hands please
um ben you suggested on here in the chat
an
article for enrique i don't know if you
want to just show me
that quickly i could comment about it
yeah i could say why i
thought of it um hi thanks for the um
presentations very um
fascinating i was thinking when you
mentioned black to
transparent that um
that was sort of i think he used the
words in terms of
um just being able to tell
what the algorithms are doing but i
i'm sort of sensitive to also the sense
of
maybe the uh
the perspectives from which we're trying
to or the tech is trying to understand
the values
and i think how we understand what
values are
in a situation are is affected by
the implicit values in how we're looking
and there's probably some care um
over notions like transparency
um that we don't suddenly think that we
have
actual descriptions or transparent or
white descriptions of the values but
there's some kind of essential ignorance
still
within the overall situation um
yeah so i just suggested i thought that
really that
that paper sort of talks about black and
white boxes in a really nice way and i
thought it might um
be relevant to the sort of bigger
picture you're trying to deal with
yeah yeah yeah thank you thank you
absolutely yeah just uh to quickly
mention uh
so what we tried to do for example in
the first
in our first project to identify which
values were relevant to a discussion
to give an example of how we tried to
let's say
have humans in the decision-making power
so the idea that we had was to we took
answers to a survey
as luciano said about two surveys one
about energy transition on about
lockdown measures and we tried to
guide human annotators so
mostly they were policy experts or value
experts
to guide them through this data set and
try to find the values
in what people wrote so we had some
guidelines and try to
invite them to see values only in what
they wrote what
the participants wrote instead of just
um
coming up with these values on their own
so sort of what this means is that we
can
ultimately use let's say also trace back
these values from what people had
written originally in this survey and
that should sort
somehow give a little bit more of a
transparency and
at least making it grounded in data and
where data is what actual people had
written
so this is uh this is just an example
but anyway
yeah anyway it's tough to make
transparent boxes
yeah thanks for that um uh i think that
the kind of being able to kind of trace
the process is really valuable like that
that sounds like a i think that could be
some there might be different ways that
process happens and it might be
interesting to compare
um compare those so the different ways
that values get read
would be an interesting topic yeah
yeah okay so ben thank you very much for
sharing i think that's
yeah looks also interesting reference
and not yeah for
for me i believe for some others also
here in this meeting
in this talk so uh do we have more
questions
marcos please go ahead hey
hello uh sorry for not turning on my
camera i don't know it just
don't work no problem okay
um i i i'm i was thinking when you were
talking about um context specific
um personal values are taking this into
account
and if you are considering that some
collective decisions
they need to match match diverse
deliberations
not very much uh just help every person
or group to
deliberate or create a consensus
or that calls for every
specific deliberations but um
showing how uh different group
deliberations can be met
together to um
to make a collective decision i don't
know if you forget what i'm i'm trying
to say
not really okay well um
i always give this example when you're
designing a neighborhood for example
a lot of people have different desires
you have to
match all those desires most as you can
for designing this neighborhood for
example
so it's more than just giving people
what are all those values involved
and the conquest of every value but
the decision the final decision needs
the
the match of those
and it's different from a consensus it's
not a consensus of
what is better for all or some like this
but to show people that they can't be
matched
in a way you know and i think this
artificial intelligence
can help maybe and when you talked about
specific content uh values and showing
this
i think this maybe can get in like this
specific way of helping collective
decisions
that's why i'm posting this
yeah yeah no yeah absolutely that's also
why
we think like uh you know nick mata
and all those the the
people behind the participatory valley
evaluation that's uh that's essentially
what you're talking about in a way
so the idea is to instead of under
instead of
uh take what people would prefer
it's like the policy options that they
would prefer or for example
how they would prefer to relax lockdown
measures
instead of reading those they read the
values that people
the the reason why people would like to
relax certain
policy measures and this is much more
informative to the policy makers
especially because especially in the
situations where
things change rapidly like well in
corona
so understanding the values behind
people's decisions
helps so that's and also essentially
you would instead of aggregating for
preferences you would aggregate for
values
and that would be very helpful for uh
sorry that would be very helpful for a
moderator or policy maker or
neighborhood designer
thank you very much great so
i think yeah we we we ran out of time so
yeah we are almost running out of time
um
so i think i would like to yeah thanks
enrico
thanks michael for the very interesting
talk
and yeah thanks everyone for joining us
and
see some of you again next week so
all right thank you and feel free to
contact us personally for any kind of
questions really
we're open to discuss