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Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH

This Dagstuhl Seminar will synthesize research perspectives from computing, with insights from the law, public administration, and the social sciences. In particular, the relevant communities in computing include Semantic Web, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Deontic Logics, Logic Programming, Multiagent Systems, Privacy and Security, and Legal Informatics.

The special theme of this conference is Argumentation in the Digital Society. The main objective of the conference is to identify the key research areas related to the dynamics of change and development in today’s digitised society. Social media bring with them many new communication opportunities and open up a range of exciting challenges related to new forms of argumentation with unprecedented reach and associated social impact. They may also generate phenomena that can negatively affect the rationality and the reasonableness of argumentative discourse. Particularly noteworthy among these is the phenomenon of polarisation, which is of considerable importance for the distancing of social groups (including social media user communities) from each other, as well as phenomena such as the spread of fake news, offensive language, and hate speech. These and other phenomena in digitised communication may constitute a block to the development of rational and reasonable activity in argumentative discourse. Hence there is a need to develop the theoretical tools of argumentation and related disciplines that allow discussion and argument to be founded on trust, charity, and goodwill. The conference aims to explore these topics and ensure a high-quality exchange of research results.

Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH

In this Dagstuhl Seminar, we want to focus on three main topics. The first one is data, which has become an essential element for COMSOC research. In fact, thanks to the availability of open libraries, datasets and tools, researchers can now implement and test their algorithms for collective decision-making on real-life data, complementing their theoretical results. The second one is participation, as in recent years many municipalities and public institutions have moved towards various forms of participatory and digital democracy, with the goal of increasing the citizens' active role and engagement in the public life of their communities. The third one is time, as although many collective decision-making problems have an underlying repeated nature, this dimension has thus far not received the deserved attention within standard COMSOC models.

Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH

Recently, democracies have been challenged at their very core: election outcomes are regularly contested, election procedures questioned, and distrust sown, as exemplified by the aftermath of recent elections in the 2020 Presidential election in the US and the 2022 election in Brazil. Hence, one of the essential qualities of any election, poll, or referendum is that it should provide firm evidence that the announced result truly reflects the will of the electorate.