Publications related to Voting

Robust Sparse Voting

Rachid Guerraoui, Youssef Allouah, Oscar Jean Olivier Villemaud, Le Nguyen Hoang

Many applications, such as content moderation and recommendation, require reviewing and scoring a large number of alternatives. Doing so robustly is however very challenging. Indeed, voters' inputs are inevitably sparse: most alternatives are only scored b ...

2024

Discrete-Choice Mining of Social Processes

Victor Kristof

Poor decisions and selfish behaviors give rise to seemingly intractable global problems, such as the lack of transparency in democratic processes, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. However, people are more predict ...

EPFL2021

Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness of Shareholder Democracy

Maxime Thibault B Couvert

This thesis is composed of two essays that study the effectiveness of shareholder democracy. In the first essay, I analyze the firm value implications of shareholder-initiated proposals. I show that managerial resistance precludes half of shareholder-init ...

EPFL2021

Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology? A Layered-Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges

Bryan Alexander Ford

While technology is often claimed to be “democratizing”, the technologizing of society has more often yielded undemocratic or even anti-democratic outcomes. Is technology fundamentally at odds with democracy, or is it merely a rich and infinitely-adaptable ...

University of Chicago Press2021

Adapting Virtual Embodiment through Reinforcement Learning

Olaf Blanke, Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut, Yawen Hou

In Virtual Reality, having a virtual body opens a wide range of possibilities as the participant's avatar can appear to be quite different from oneself for the sake of the targeted application (e.g. for perspective-taking). In addition, the system can part ...

2021

Late Fusion of the Available Lexicon and Raw Waveform-based Acoustic Modeling for Depression and Dementia Recognition

Petr Motlicek, Mathew Magimai Doss, Julian David Fritsch, Subrahmanya Pavankumar Dubagunta

Mental disorders, e.g. depression and dementia, are categorized as priority conditions according to the World Health Organization (WHO). When diagnosing, psychologists employ structured questionnaires/interviews, and different cognitive tests. Although acc ...

ISCA-INT SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOC2021

The probability of intransitivity in dice and close elections

Jan Hazla

We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for n-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to 1/2, that a throw from one die is higher than the other. We ...

2020

The Distortion of Distributed Voting

Aris Filos Ratsikas

Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the voting process on the ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2019

Percolation and Internet Science

Emanuele Massaro

Percolation, in its most general interpretation, refers to the “flow” of something (a physical agent, data or information) in a network, possibly accompanied by some nonlinear dynamical processes on the network nodes (sometimes denoted reaction–diffusion s ...

2019

Rethinking General-Purpose Decentralized Computing

Bryan Alexander Ford, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Georgia Fragkouli, Enis Ceyhun Alp

While showing great promise, smart contracts are difficult to program correctly, as they need a deep understanding of cryptography and distributed algorithms, and offer limited functionality, as they have to be deterministic and cannot operate on secret da ...

Association for Computing Machinery2019

The geographic evolution of political cleavages in Switzerland: A network approach to assessing levels and dynamics of polarization between local populations

Shin Alexandre Koseki

Scholarly studies and common accounts of national politics enjoy pointing out the resilience of ideological divides among populations. Building on the image of political cleavages and geographic polarization, the regionalization of politics has become a tr ...

2018

Moral Matrices : Space Through the Unfolding of Direct Democracy in Switzerland

Shin Alexandre Koseki

In this dissertation, I address the political and moral geography of Swiss federal participatory votes for the period between 1981 and 2014 to re-investigate some of the fundamental questions left open in urban sciences: how and why socio-ethical, moral an ...

EPFL2017

Online Collaborative Prediction of Regional Vote Results

Patrick Thiran, Matthias Grossglauser, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan, Vincent Etter

We consider online predictions of vote results, where regions across a country vote on an issue under discussion. Such online predictions before and during the day of the vote are useful to media agencies, polling institutes, and political parties, e.g., t ...

IEEE2016

Rule of Thumb – Effect of Social Button Icons on Interaction

Denis Gillet, Samuel Bendahan, Adrian Christian Holzer, Andrii Vozniuk

Social buttons are now widespread in social media apps. They are used to assign weight to user content and trigger user engagement. They come in different shapes (e.g., thumb in Facebook, arrows in Reddit or StackOverflow, plus one in Google+) but very lit ...

2016

Combine and Conquer : Mining Social Systems for Prediction

Vincent Etter

In this thesis, we explore the application of data mining and machine learning techniques to several practical problems. These problems have roots in various fields such as social science, economics, and political science. We show that computer science tec ...

EPFL2015

Mining Democracy

Patrick Thiran, Matthias Grossglauser, Julien Pierre Sacha Herzen, Vincent Etter

Switzerland has a long tradition of direct democracy, which makes it an ideal laboratory for research on real-world politics. Similar to recent open government initiatives launched worldwide, the Swiss government regularly releases datasets related to stat ...

2014

Evaluation of Atlas Fusion Strategies for Segmentation of Head and Neck Lymph Nodes for Radiotherapy Planning

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Meritxell Bach Cuadra, Subrahmanyam Venkata Ravi Mohana Sai Gorthi

Accurate segmentation of lymph nodes in head and neck (H&N) CT images is essential for the radiotherapy planning of the H&N cancer. Atlas-based segmentation methods are widely used for the automated segmentation of such structures. Multi-atlas approaches a ...

Ieee2012

Protein Domain Prediction and Alternative Splicing Histories : a Modular View

Yann Christinat

Modularity is at the core of bioinformatics. Here we focused on two different building blocks: protein domains and exons. While protein domains enable us to study the protein‚s functions, exons allow us to understand the evolution of the former. However, a ...

EPFL2012

Measurement System Configuration for Damage Identification of Continuously Monitored Structures

Ian Smith, Nizar Bel Hadj Ali, Ngoc Thanh Trinh, Irwanda Laory

Measurement system configuration is an important task in structural health monitoring in that decisions influence the performance of monitoring systems. This task is generally performed using only engineering judgment and experience. Such approach may resu ...

American Society of Civil Engineers2012

Automatic Mallampati Classification Using Active Appearance Models

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Matteo Sorci, Anil Yuce, Gabriel Louis Cuendet

Difficult tracheal intubation assessment is an important research topic in anesthesia as failed intubations are important causes of mortality in anesthetic practice. The modified Mallampati score is widely used, alone or in conjunction with other criteria, ...

2012