Human societies have evolved a variety of successful structures for communication and negotiation between individuals with diverse or conflicting viewpoints. These range from manners governing polite conversation, to laws around jury trials, procedures for formal debates, academic peer review, and even the processes of democratic elections. The development of new digital technologies in the space of social media, natural language processing and machine learning is accelerating the disruption of these old forms of communication. At the same time, it also creates platforms for new possibilities.
Research into decision-making has shown that groups collaborating on a problem can, in the right conditions, outperform even the most knowledgeable of individual group members. The exchange of arguments has been shown to be key to this. Technologies which support better argument production, exchange and comprehension have great potential both in understanding how we can make better decisions, and in enhancing personal, educational and workplace environments where argument exchange can boost productivity and wellbeing.
The first edition of the Deliberation4Good workshop will bring together experts in existing and emerging technologies of argumentative communication, to explore how the old can inform the new and how the new can augment the old. We are gathering people from psychology, social, political and computer science to provide a platform for them to collaborate and share their research, towards answering the moonshot question: “How can people with diverging views be supported to successfully communicate and negotiate?”
Date and Venue
The workshop will take place on the 14th of October in Fitzwilliam College Cambridge (Location).
Programme
Preliminary schedule published here: https://www.delibot.xyz/schedule-d4g/
Invited Speakers
Sacha Altay, University of Oxford, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
Maria Liakata, Queen Mary, University of London and The Alan Turing Institute.
Shauna Concannon, University of Durham
Ekaterina Kochmar, University of Bath, Department of Computer Science
Jon Roozenbeek, University of Cambridge, Department of Psychology
Organisers
Georgi Karadzhov, University of Cambridge
Andreas Vlachos, University of Cambridge
Tom Stafford, University of Sheffield
Christine De Kock, University of Cambridge
Youmna Farag, University of Cambridge
Call for Participation
We are preparing a rich programme with invited talks, demos, and paper presentations. If your work is related to how people with diverging views successfully communicate and collaborate please reach out to us with a talk proposal!
Registration to participate and/or present is free for the full day of the workshop. Please register here by the 28th of September: https://forms.gle/GyHzreJ5Wj32GF986
If you’d like to present a talk or have any other questions, please reach out to gmk34@cam.ac.uk or to any of the organisers!
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