Events
Friday, January 24, 2025 | 8:30-5:00pm | Connan Room, CUC
CSD Spring Mini-Workshop
8:30am: Pastries, bagels and coffee
9:00–10:30am: Session I
- Weijing Tang “Inference and learning for signed networks guided by social theory”
- Peem Lerdputtipongporn, “Causal Inference in Dynamic Networks."
- Osman Yagan, “Correlated propagation of multiple opinions and its impact on polarization. “
- Kevin Zollman, “Network Structure and the Emergence of Pluralistic Ignorance”
10:30–11:00am: Break
11:00am–12:30pm: Session II
- Kara Kedrick, “Navigating Explanatory Landscapes: Spanning Internal Representations, Social Exchanges, and Artifacts”
- Yinuo Du “Group Prisoner’s Dilemmas”
- Mandy Simons “Against conversational common ground”
- Nihar Shah, “Algorithms and Experiments for Paper and Proposal Reviewing”
12:30–1:30pm: Lunch, provided or bring your own
1:30–3:00pm: Session III
- Christopher Warren "Who Printed Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (1689)?"
- Ratip Emin Berker, "Agreement-based Aggregation of Rankings”
- Justin Payan, "Online Telescope Observation Scheduling"
- Siddharth Namachivayam, “Topological Semantics for Common Inductive Knowledge.”
3:00–3:30pm: Break
3:30–5:00pm: Session IV
- Nynke Niezink “Social Network Perceptions: Different Points of View"
- Aydin Mohseni, “The Value of Value Learning.”
- Erin Bugbee, “When and Why We Stop Searching: Experimental Insights into Optimal Stopping Decisions”
- Alexander Goldberg, “Privacy Risks (and Mitigations) in Open Review Systems.”
6:00pm: Dinner at Butterjoint on Craig Street
Dinner RVSPs: Weijing Tang, Kevin Zollman, Erin Bugbee, Kara Kedrick, Cosma Shalizi, Siddharth Namachivayam, Peem Lerdputtipongporn, Aydin Mohseni, Justin Payan, Alexander Goldberg
Thursday, December 5, 2024 | 12:30-2:00pm | Porter Hall 223D
Roberto Vargas
Talk Title: Concept Graphs of Societal Institutions Reflect Differences between Racial Identities and Partisan News Consumption
Abstract: Social groups represent a collective identity defined by a distinct consensus of concepts (e.g., ideas, values, and goals) whose structural relationship varies between groups. In a recent study, I sought to measure how a set of inter-concept semantic associations, comprising what we refer to as a concept graph, covaries between established social groups, based on racial identity, and how this effect is mediated by information ecosystems, contextualized as news sources. Group differences among racial identity (278 Black and 294 White Americans) and informational ecosystems (Left- and Right- leaning news sources) emerged in subjective judgments of how the meaning of concepts such as healthcare, police, and voting relate to each other. While news consumption partly explained racial differences in how these concepts relate to each other, the differences persisted even after accounting for media exposure. Although racial identity and political ideologies have long been associated with differing attitudes and thoughts on societal institutions, using a graphical approach offers deeper insights into how these thoughts are structured. This framework paves the way for future research on how these conceptual associations may predict decision-making, beliefs, and language use.
Thursday, November 21, 2024 |12:30-2:00pm |Porter Hall 223D
Melanie Mitchell
Talk Title: AI’s Challenge of Understanding the World
Abstract: I will survey a debate in the artificial intelligence (AI) research community on the extent to which current AI systems can be said to “understand” language and the physical and social situations language encodes. I will describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding, hypothesize about what humanlike understanding entails, and discuss what methods can be used to fairly evaluate understanding and intelligence in AI systems.
Short Bio: Melanie Mitchell is Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction and analogy-making in artificial intelligence systems. Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her 2009 book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, and her 2019 book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) was shortlisted for the 2023 Cosmos Prize for Scientific Writing.
Friday, November 15, 2024 | 12:30-2:00pm |Dowd Room, CUC
Kerem Oktar
Talk Title: How Opinions Shape Beliefs
Abstract: Social learning extends the horizon of our beliefs beyond lived experience. For example, we can learn that the Earth is warming without feeling warmer --- or that molecules exist without ever seeing one --- by listening to others' opinions. Yet people seem to frequently ignore each other's opinions rather than learning from them, both at the societal scale and in intimate interpersonal interactions. For example, people confidently maintain their beliefs on key issues (such as gun regulation) despite massive societal dissent, and people easily ignore advice from peers and experts on important decisions, such as which medical treatment they should pursue. In this talk, I will share an overview of my research program, which examines the cognitive mechanisms that cause us to ignore each others' beliefs across scales and domains. This research draws on interdisciplinary insights (including philosophy, psychology, and economics), uses computational modeling to formalize mechanisms of inference, and tests these mechanisms through behavioral experiments.
November 7, 2024 | 12:30-2:00pm | Posner 277
Jeffrey C. Zemla
Talk Title: Free recall of semantically related items reveals similarity structure
Abstract: Semantic processing plays a significant role in free recall. When a study list contains semantically related pairs of words, those pairs tend to be recalled closely together. We asked participants to study and recall lists of fifteen words drawn from three categories, presented in a random order. We show that a semantic network that encodes pairwise associations can be estimated using lag data, i.e., the distance between pairs of items both in a study list and recall list. The estimated networks capture the category structure with high sensitivity and specificity.
October 25, 2024 | 1:00–2:30pm (EDT) | BH 145C
Max Noichl (University of Bamberg and University of Vienna)
Talk Title: Towards Empirical Robustness in Network Epistemology
Abstract: One of the central papers in simulation studies of science argues that less communication can lead to higher reliability. More generally, simulation studies have been used to explore which communication networks enhance collective reliability and speed of convergence. However, this literature has largely concentrated on relatively simple network structures (e.g., cycles, wheels, full graphs), which bear little resemblance to real social networks. Does less communication often lead to higher reliability also in real social networks? In this talk, we provide the first results concerning the empirical robustness of these findings with respect to real social networks.
We develop a novel method to perform this empirical robustness analysis. First, we use citation graphs to depict empirical networks commonly discussed in the literature as examples of lagging discovery—i.e., one concerning the bacterial causes of peptic ulcers and another concerning the prolonged history of the perceptron. Second, we develop a new method to generate a sample of “similar” networks, based on the optimization of generative network models toward the sampled empirical ones. Third, we work out the collective reliability and speed of convergence of these communication networks by running simulations. Finally, we analyze the data about these networks to determine which outcomes can be expected in real networks and which network properties (e.g., degree heterogeneity, clustering, etc.) strongly affect collective reliability and speed of convergence.
This is joint work with Ignacio Quintana and Hein Duijf.
December 1, 2023
Lightning Talk Event
I am delighted to invite you to the first Institute for Complex Social Dynamics Lightning Talk Event. Our first event will take place on Friday, December 1 from 11:00am - 1:00pm. Lunch will be provided.
Location: Rachel Mellon Walton room in Posner Hall
The event is in-person only. Sorry there will be no Zoom option.
This event is a series of short ten minute talks from members of the Institute to advertise their current work to other members and students. Anyone is welcome to attend!
We are especially eager for students who might be interested in a graduate collaboration grant.
Here is the schedule of talks:
11:00am–Noon:
Cosma Shalizi, “Matching simulations to data with random features”
John Miller, “The Emergence of Institutions”
Kara Kedrick, “Guess again: how answer generation shapes curiosity”
Alexy Kushnir, “Optimal Mechanisms in Multi-Dimensional Environments”
Oana Carja, "Understanding the adaptive properties of shape and structure in biological systems"
Noon–1:00pm:
Jiashun Jin, “The MADStat data set”
Nihar Shah, "Algorithms and Experiments for Improved Peer Review"
Vincent Conitzer, "Foundations of Cooperative AI"
Russell Golman, “The Collective Wisdom of Behavioral Game Theory”
Simon DeDeo, “Human Cognition and Computational Complexity”