DemocrAI 2023: The 2nd International Workshop on Democracy and AI Sheraton Grand Macao Macao, August 20, 2023

Online crowd-based platforms are currently driving the creation of new forms of democracy. These new platforms are primarily designed to address the limitations caused by geographical, cultural, religious, and ethnic divides. AI-assisted democracy is a promising idea that pledges to take full advantage of AI's capabilities in supporting the collaborative activities of humans, in gathering, sharing, and coming out with solutions to wicked problems that humanity is currently facing.

The success of AI-based democracy depends on many criteria, such as the availability of online platforms for democratic decision-making, the research on formal theories of democratic collaboration, the methodologies to evaluate democratic deliberation, the existence of a socio-psychological understanding of democracy, and the identification of the ethical and legal issues surrounding the integration of AI in society. Such processes are complex and often involve various epistemic constraints along the concurrent activities of the stakeholders. Given the premise that AI systems should be, in principle, smart enough to alleviate these issues, various technologies could be combined to this end, and include multiagent systems, machine learning, game theory, mechanism design, argumentation theories, computational social choice, preference elicitation, case-based reasoning, and so forth.

This DemocrAI 2023 workshop investigates novel pathways to democracy using agent-based methodologies and tools, relevant formal theories, and ethical, legal, and socio-psychological insights on democracy and its future. The topics of the workshop could be summarized as follows.

• Technologies and Platforms for Group Decision-Making

• Formal Theories of Decision-Making, such as Formal Argumentation, Game Theory, and Mechanism Design

• Multiagent Systems, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, and Distributed Ledgers

• Wisdom of the Crowds, Collective Intelligence, and Superminds

• Liquid, Digital, Cyber, Hyper, and Augmented Forms of Democracy

• Social Choice Theory and Computational Social Choice

• Social Sciences, Sociology, Social Psychology, and Political science

• Ethical, Legal, and Societal Issues in Collective Decision-Making

• Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, and Human-Based Computation

• The Sustainable Development Goals or Global Goals and Artificial Intelligence

Researchers and practitioners in various communities of AI, autonomous agents, multiagent systems, sociology, and social psychology, are actively working on these issues. This workshop aims to bring together people from these communities to learn about each other's approaches to AI-empowered democracy, encourage the cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas, and foster long-term research collaborations.

The research on AI-based democracy is highly relevant to some of the critical objectives of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) community. This workshop will be an excellent opportunity for researchers and experts who wish to share their preliminary insights on any workshop topics. There are currently few workshops in AI venues geared toward agent-based crowd decision-making, as most workshops focus on narrower topics in AI. Our workshop is paramount to spurring wider discussions on novel agent-based tools and technologies of crowd collaboration with real social implications.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions must be written in English, prepared using the new CEUR-ART paper style (1 column), formatted in PDF, and submitted via EasyChair. An Overleaf template for LaTeX users is available here. You can also download an offline version with the style files for LaTeX and MS Word. The DemocrAI 2023 workshop offers two types of submissions:  

• Regular papers: 6 pages long, including the references. Regular paper submissions must contain enough substance to be cited in future publications and may not have appeared before.

• Extended abstracts: 3 pages long, including the references. Extended abstracts could cover topics of interest to the DemocrAI audience, including research activities, ideas, positions, preliminary results, or illustrations of systems and applications.

Due to the double-blind review policy, please do not include author information or acknowledgments in the submissions.

Submission website: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=democrai2023

Review Process and Acceptance Standards

The workshop welcomes submissions of original research relevant to the topics described above. At least three reviewers from our PC members will review all submitted papers through a double-blind peer-review process. The acceptance standards include its technical soundness, novelty, impact, and readability.

All accepted papers are expected to be presented at the conference, and at least one author of each accepted paper must travel to the IJCAI venue in person. Multiple submissions of the same paper to other IJCAI workshops are forbidden. The host conference, IJCAI, strongly discourages remote or hybrid presentations during the workshops for any talks (including invited talks).

Proceedings

All regular papers will be submitted to CEUR-WS.org for online publication. Papers will be published under a CC BY 4.0 license that will be included in an open-access CEUR Workshop Proceedings volume, indexed by both Scopus and DBLP.

Distinguished Paper Awards

Distinguished paper awards will be presented to outstanding regular papers, including an award for the best crowd award that incorporates the workshop theme and is selected based on the decision of the workshop attendees.

Committees

Program Committee

• Dr. Tokuro Matsuo, Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, Japan
• Dr. Shigeo Matsubara, Osaka University, Japan
• Dr. Sofia Sahab, Kyoto University, Japan
• Dr. Jawad Haqbeen, Kyoto University, Japan
• Dr. Shiyao Ding, Kyoto University, Japan
• Dr. Wen Gu, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
• Dr. Ryuta Arisaka, Kyoto University, Japan
• Dr. Naoki Fukuta, Shizuoka University, Japan
• Dr. Shun Okuhara, Mie University, Japan
• Dr. Weihua Li, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
• Dr. Yi Yang, Deakin University, Australia
• Dr. Nor Khalid, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia
• Dr. Fuyuan Xiao, Chongqing University, China
• Dr. Reyhan Aydogan, Ozyegin University, Turkey
• Dr. Takanobu Otsuka, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
• Dr. Shantanu Chakraborty, AVEVA Australia Pty, Australia

Organizing Committee

• Dr. Rafik Hadfi. Associate Professor. Kyoto University, Japan
• Dr. Takayuki Ito. Professor. Kyoto University, Japan
• Dr. Susumu Ohnuma. Professor. Hokkaido University, Japan
• Dr. Shun Shiramatsu. Professor. Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan

Invited Speakers

TBA

Venue

The workshop will be held at the Sheraton Grand Macao in Macao, S.A.R., in conjunction with IJCAI 2023.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Rafik Hadfi (rafik.hadfi [at] i.kyoto-u.ac.jp)