We are excited to announce that three projects from the Information and Communication Technology 2023 (ICT) call “Digital Humanism” by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) have been selected for funding!

The projects that have been selected are:

• Julia Neidhardt’s project “Disentangling effects of digitization on linguistic diversity”. Julia will be working on this project together with Andreas Baumann and Hannes Fellner (both from the University of Vienna)
• “Acquiring and explaining norms for AI systems” by Agatha Ciabattoni, who will be working together with John Horty (University of Maryland) and Cristinel Mateis (AIT - Austrian Institute of Technology)
• “Citizen-centered democratic innovation: Understanding citizen preferences for participatory budgeting algorithms” by Jan Maly, who will be joined by Carolina Plescia (University of Vienna)

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 2023 Call „Digital Humanism” invited scientists to conduct interdisciplinary research 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 1.5 million Euros.

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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