We are excited to announce that two projects from The Information and Communication Technology 2023 Call „Digital Humanism” by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) have been selected for funding!

The projects that have been selected are “Acquiring and explaining norms for AI systems”, headed by Agatha Ciabattoni, who is also Head of the Research Unit Theory and Logic, as well as the project “Citizen-centered democratic innovation: Understanding citizen preferences for participatory budgeting algorithms” by Jan Maly.

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 2023 Call „Digital Humanism” invited scientists to conduct interdisciplinary reserach between the social sciences, humanities and computer sciences/ICT that address digital technologies and practices from a human-centered and societal perspective in the field of Digital Humanism. Together, the projects are funded with over 1.1 million Euros.

Agata’s Project

Acquiring and explaining norms for AI systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been permeating various facets of our daily lives. They influence our purchasing choices, employment decisions, social connections, and even impact the well-being of our children and the elderly. As such, it becomes imperative for AI systems to adhere to the legal, social, and ethical norms of the societies in which they operate. Addressing this imperative, the field of machine ethics is dedicated to crafting AI systems capable of embodying normative competence. A central open problem in this field is the acquisition and representation of normative information in a form that allows for machine implementation. This endeavor necessitates an interdisciplinary approach, which is offered by the AXAIS project. This project leverages diverse expertise to acquire norms for use in AI systems, with a focus on ensuring the explainability of decision-making processes guided by these norms. The project’s approach combines methodologies from Natural Language Processing, Logic, and Legal Reasoning. Through this synthesis, the aim is to create a framework capable of automatically translating extensive norm codes, while providing symbolic representations with a clear meaning. The envisioned framework champions explicable reasoning and allows complex normative information to be acquired from simple decisions, akin to the practice of case-based reasoning in legal contexts.

About Agata Ciabattoni

Agata Ciabattoni is a Full Professor at the TU Wien Informatics and the Head of the Research Unit Theory and Logic. She is the co-chair of the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms (VCLA), a member of the council of the Association of Symbolic Logic, co-chair of the Steering Committee (SC) of the Society of Deontic Logic and Normative Systems, and a member of several SC, including Women in Logic, a forum that supports women working on logic-related topics. In 2011 she received the START prize, the highest Austrian award for early career researchers, for her project Non classical proofs: Theory, Applications and Tools. Agata Ciabattoni works on logics different from classical logic: theory, applications and tools. Her running research projects include the WWTF project “TAIGER: Training and Guiding AI Agents with Ethical Rules” (with Ezio Bartocci and Thomas Eiter), and the FWF project (Weave with Germany and Luxemburg) “Logical methods for Deontic Explanations” (with Leon van der Torre and Christian Strasser.

Jan’s Project

Citizen-centered democratic innovation: Understanding citizen preferences for participatory budgeting algorithms

According to the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism, digital technologies should be designed to promote democracy, inclusion and enhance civic participation. Today, the need for new forms of political participation for ordinary citizens is higher than ever in light of the record low levels of trust in politics and declining civic engagement. One of the most widespread and popular examples of democratic innovation is participatory budgeting (PB), which allows citizens to decide how to allocate (parts of) cities’ budgets. Specifically in Europe, PB often takes the form of e-PB, where most of the participation happens online. This has spurred significant effort into the development of sophisticated algorithms that enable complex voting mechanisms for e-PB. However, little progress has been made in understanding what citizens expect from such algorithms and what properties would make the decisions produced by such algorithms legitimate in the eyes of citizens. This can only be answered by combining methods from political science for eliciting citizens’ preferences and legitimacy concerns with methods from computer science that show which properties can actually be satisfied. This project aims to bring two teams from computer science and political science together to understand citizen preferences for the algorithms behind e-PB voting and to develop algorithms respecting these preferences as much as possible.

About Jan Maly

Jan Maly is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Data, Process and Knowledge Management (DPKM) of the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) and a postdoctoral researcher in the Databases and Artificial Intelligence Group (DBAI) at TU Wien Informatics. He received an Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship from the FWF for his project “A holistic analysis of participatory budgeting.” From 2021 to 2023, he worked at the University of Amsterdam as a member of the Computational Social Choice (COMSOC) Group, and from 2023 to 2024, he worked as a member of DBAI at TU Wien Informatics. His main research focus is in the fields of COMSOC and Logic and Knowledge Representation, and he is interested in studying and developing tools that help people make better decisions, individually or as a group. His current focus is on non-standard voting frameworks such as Participatory Budgeting and Perpetual Voting, on the representation of preferences, and on computational complexity questions that arise in COMSOC and logic. He also co-founded the European Digital DemocracY network, which aims to bring together academics and practitioners actively working on or with digital democracy.

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