The Thematic Line 5 organizes the first Lab Talk of SocioDigital Lab for Public Policy initiatives for 2024/25, “Data-Driven Perspectives: Machine Learning for Social Issues and Visualization for Trust and Decision-Making“. On December 3, 2024, researchers Tomás Alves (BRU-Iscte) and Pedro Mariano (ISTAR-Iscte) will present their recent work on Data visualization and on Simulation for social sciences, respectively. Then, they will debate common points and possible implications for public policies.
Join us at Clube Iscte-CI (Room B332, Building 4) from 13:00 to 14:00 and be part of this discussion.
Abstract for Tomás Alves’ talk
Data visualization plays a critical role in how individuals interpret and interact with complex information, influencing both user trust and decision-making. This presentation focuses on how individual differences shape users’ trust and susceptibility to cognitive biases, such as the anchoring bias and the phantom effect. Drawing on recent findings, we will discuss how visualization techniques influence the trust-building process and may trigger biases that impact decision-making. Emerging research directions will also be explored, emphasizing advances in priming and mitigation techniques for cognitive biases and in designing visualizations that support more reliable trust and decision outcomes.
Abstract for Pedro Mariano’s talk
Social Simulation is a tool to analyse complex phenomena, to model socio and economic aspects. Agents in such simulations can be as simple as the action they play in a game represented by a 2×2 matrix, or be composed of an architecture with a Large Language Model for communication, Deep Reinforcement Learning for reasoning about the environment and other players, Belief Desire and Intention model for representing knowledge about its goals, among other possibilities. In this talk I will discuss the ongoing research in these topics.
