Focusing the Macroscope: How We Can Use Data to Understand Behavior
Joana Gonçalves de Sá,
Universidade Nova de Lisboa –
Abstract:
Individual decisions can have a large impact on society as a whole. This is obvious for political decisions, but still true for small, daily decisions made by common citizens. Individuals decide how to vote, whether to stay at home when they feel sick, to drive or to take the bus. In isolation, these individual decisions have a negligible social outcome, but collectively they determine the results of an election and the start of an epidemic. For many years, studying these processes was limited to observing the outcomes or to analyzing small samples. New data sources and data analysis tools have created a “macroscope” and made it possible to start studying the behavior of large numbers of individuals, enabling the emergence of large-scale quantitative social research. At the Data Science and Policy (DS&P) research group we are interested in understanding these decision-making events, expecting that this deeper knowledge will lead to a better understanding of human nature, and to improved public decisions.
In the past, we have been focusing mainly on three types of problems, strongly dependent on both the behaviors of individuals (in what we call bottom-up collective processes), and of decision-makers (the top-down decisions). The first is related with what we usually identify as political debate and deliberation and we have computationally analyzed the past 40 years of debates in the Portuguese Parliament. The second is disease dynamics, of both infections and non-infectious diseases, and we try to improve nowcasting and forecasting of several diseases and reduce antibiotic over-prescription. The third is much more fundamental and it comes from the realization that the Digital Era is offering us a giant mirror, a macroscope, that will allow us to understand human behavior at a completely new scale. By using both social networks and the spread of fake news as case studies, we are trying to identify underlying principles, both mathematical and behavioral, that can be generalized to different contexts.
In parallel, and recognizing that these tools might also have a very negative impact on society, we try to raise public awareness of these risks and involve citizens in the definition of appropriate ethical guidelines and legislation.
During the talk I will briefly describe some of these past projects and offer examples of how we can use data science to study psychology and human behavior. At the end, I will present new ideas in distributed computing and how it can help us in privacy protection.
Bio
Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Associate Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the leader of the Data Science and Policy research group. Before that, she was a Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), Portugal, where she remains as the Coordinator of the Science for Society Initiative and as the Director of the Graduate Program Science for Development (PGCD), aiming at improving science in Africa.
Her current research uses complex systems and data analytics tools to study problems at the interface between Biomedicine, Computation, Policy, Social Sciences, and Mathematics. These include epidemiology, critical thinking, network dynamics, political discourse, and their applications to human-behavior, with a large ethical and societal focus. She is also the President of the General Assembly of the Citizens Forum, an NGO that aims at improving the quality of the democratic discussion, through citizen assemblies.
Joana has a degree in Physics Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico – University of Lisbon, and a PhD in Systems Biology from NOVA – ITQB, having developed her thesis at Harvard University, USA. In 2019, she was the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant to study human behavior using the online spread of “fake news” as a model system.
Date: 2019-Dec-20 Time: 16:00:00 Room: Room 0.19 Pavilhão informática II, IST Alameda
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Upcoming Events
Francisco António Chaves Saraiva de Melo: “Agregação” (Habilitation) in Computer Science and Engineering
Francisco António Chaves Saraiva de Melo, INESC-ID researcher within the Artificial Intelligence for People and Society Research Area and Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Instituto Superior Técnico, will present a course unit report and a seminar in order to be awarded his Agregação (Habilitation) in Computer Science and Engineering on 30th and 31st May 2022.
Francisco Melo will present the course unit report titled Planning, Learning, and Intelligent Decision Making at 9am on 30th May 2022 (available on Zoom), followed by the seminar Reinforcement learning: A dynamical systems viewpoint at 9am on 31st May 2022 (available on Zoom).
2nd RiverCure Workshop
Location: Meeting room of Department of Civil Engineering, Civil Engineering Building, Instituto Superior Técnico, Alameda Campus.
Agenda
9:00 – 9:10 Welcoming attendants
9:10 – 9:30 Overview of the project and main outputs (Rui Ferreira)
9:30 – 9:45 Mathematical modelling – HiSTAV shallow water solver (Daniel Conde)
9:45 – 10:00 Laboratory observatory – tools (Luís Mendes/Rui Ferreira)
10:00 – 10:15 Laboratory observatory – lab models (Rui Aleixo/Rui Ferreira)
10:15 – 10:30 Break
10:30 – 10:45 Field observatory – tools (Bruno Martins)
10:45 – 11:00 Field observatory – February 2016 and December 2019 floods, Rio Águeda (Rodrigo Oliveira)
11:00 – 11:20 The RiverCure portal – Conception and implementation (Alberto Silva)
11:20 – 11:40 The RiverCure portal – Applications (Ana Margarida Ricardo/Alberto Silva)
11:40 – 12:30 Discussion and Ending
RiverCure is a partnership of Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente, INESC-ID and IST-ID.
Support: APRH – Comissão Especializada em Hidráulica Fluvial
Funding: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) RiverCure: Curating and assimilating crowdsourced and authoritative data to reduce uncertainty in river flow modelling. PTDC/CTA-OHR/29360/2017
Further details on the RiverCure project are available here.