Example PhD

Social Decision Making

Supervisor: Professor A.D. Preece

Keywords: to follow...

Decisions are often made by people working in collaboration. Sometimes this happens between "equals" (e.g. some friends choosing where to go on holiday) and other times between an "expert" and a "lay person" (e.g. a doctor and patient agreeing on a course of treatment). Making a difficult decision involves a dialogue - which sometimes develops into an argument - and the weighing up of various factors. Often, research is involved: someone may present some evidence they've found in order to back-up their view, or undercut someone else's view. Different people will typically view the "weight" of a particular piece of evidence differently. These kinds of discussions often take place online in email threads, forums, and blog comments. There are also software tools that help users "map out" a dialogue or argument. Researchers have developed ways of representing the "weight" of evidence. For example, subjective logic allows a piece of information to be qualified in terms of how much it is believed or disbelieved by someone. This topic is about how to create an online environment for supporting these kinds of social decision-making activities. Questions include: How to support users with widely differing levels of expertise? How to handle evolving dialogues in a better way that existing online systems? How to deal with the fact that different users will have different (subjective) opinions on the weight of evidence?

• Compendium: a software tool for mapping dialogues and arguments
• background reading: social decision informatics
• an introduction to subjective logic

Key Skills/Background: to follow...

Contact: Professor A.D. Preece to discuss this research topic.