Upcoming Talks
2023
- April 4, Davide Grossi (Groningen/Amsterdam)
Deliberative Consensus
I will present a model of deliberative processes. The model focuses on a setting in which a community wishes to identify a strongly supported proposal from a large space of alternatives, in order to change a ‘status quo’ alternative. Agents dynamically form coalitions around proposals that they prefer over the status quo. Using this model I will show how the properties of the underlying abstract space of proposals and the ways in which agents can form coalitions affect the success of deliberation in identifying consensus positions. We show that, as the complexity of the proposal space increases, more complex forms of coalition formation are required in order to guarantee success. Intuitively, this seems to suggest that complex deliberative spaces require more sophisticated coalition formation abilities on the side of the agents. The model aims at providing theoretical foundations for the analysis of deliberative processes in platforms for democratic deliberation support.
This is joint work with Edit Elkind (University of Oxford), Ehud Shapiro (Weizmann Institute) and Nimrod Talmon (Ben-Gurion University).
Time: 15.30 – 17.00
Location: Janskerkhof 13, room 0.06 (Stijlkamer)
- April 25, Paige North (Utrecht)
The Univalence Principle
The Equivalence Principle is an informal principle asserting that equivalent mathematical objects have the same properties. For example, group theory has been developed so that isomorphic groups have the same group-theoretic properties, and category theory has been developed so that equivalent categories have the same category-theoretic properties (though sometimes other, ‘evil’ properties are considered). Vladimir Voevodsky established Univalent Foundations as a foundation of mathematics (based on dependent type theory) in which the Equivalence Principle for types (the basic objects of type theory) is a theorem. Later, versions of the Equivalence Principle for set-based structures such as groups and categories were shown to be theorems in Univalent Foundations.
In this work, we formulate and prove versions of the Equivalence Principle (using the “Univalence Principle”) for a large class of categorical and higher categorical structures in Univalent Foundations. Our work encompasses bicategories, dagger categories, opetopic categories, and more. Many of the notions used in our work were inspired by Makkai’s First-order logic with dependent sorts.
Time: 15.30 – 17.00
Location: Drift 6, room 0.07
- June 20, Karolina Krzyżanowska (ILLC/Amsterdam)
Title and Abstract TBA
Time: 15.30 – 17.00
Location: Janskerkhof 13, room 0.06 (Stijlkamer)