Summer School on Democracy in the age of Big Data and AI

Venice, 15 – 20 September 2019

This ODYCCEUS summer school mixes theoretical lectures with practical hands-on sessions and ateliers to examine how novel tools of computational social science can help us understand these phenomena and possibly facilitate future democratic decision processes. It introduces social scientists and media researchers to the latest methods, tools, and techniques and introduces AI researchers and complex systems scientists to the approaches and issues of social science so that they can come up with new new tools or refine existing ones.
More specifically, participants will learn how they can build Opinion Observatories that tap into social media to collect information about how certain actors are trying to manipulate political opinion in elections, how fake news gets fabricated and spreads, or how opinions get polarized and shift. They will learn how AI and social media might breathe new life into participatory democracy and how citizens can get empowered to make up their own minds or explore critical issues such as pollution or over-exploitation of their urban environment for tourism. Participants get the opportunity to present their own research in poster sessions. There will also be opportunities to visit relevant social and cultural projects in Venice.

Further information: https://ai.vub.ac.be/odycceus-2019/index.html

Penelope at Databeers Brussels

Katrien Beuls (VUB AI Lab) gave a talk about opinion tracking in online news media at the latest Databeers event in Brussels. She introduced her work on close and distant reading techniques for text analysis and promoted the Penelope platform as an open-source community effort to join scraping, NLP and statistical services in a responsive web application that allows social scientists and media researchers to find patterns in large amounts of text, but also to get a deeper analysis of a selected text, in terms of its argumentation structure and links to external knowledge sources.