Publications
2018
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(2018) Debating Transformations of National Citizenship. Bauböck R.(eds.). Cham: . p. 343-351 (true IMISCOE Research Series). Abstract
The fascinating discussion kicked-off by Liav Orgad addresses the interplay between the clouds and earth: How do cloud citizens and cloud communities relate to their earthly counterparts? Orgad presented the vision of cloud communities, yet many commentators claim that what happens in the cloud stays in the cloud and that such communities cannot have relevance to earthly matters. I claim that much of this criticism loses its force if we go all the way and aim for a global cloud community of all global citizens. And I present a possible design for such a global democracy of global citizens based on an egalitarian cryptocurrency, which we could call `cryptodemocracy'.
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(2018) Communications of the ACM. 61, 8, p. 31-34 Abstract
Considering the possibility of achieving an e-democracy based on long-established foundations that strengthen both real-world democracies and virtual Internet communities.
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Sybil-Resilient Reality-Aware Social Choice(2018) arXiv. Abstract
Sybil attacks, in which fake or duplicate identities (\emph{sybils}) infiltrate an online community, pose a serious threat to such communities, as they might tilt community-wide decisions in their favor. While the extensive research on sybil identification may help keep the fraction of sybils in such communities low, it cannot however ensure their complete eradication. Thus, our goal is to enhance social choice theory with effective group decision mechanisms for communities with bounded sybil penetration. Inspired by Reality-Aware Social Choice, we use the status quo as the anchor of \emph{sybil resilience}, characterized by \emph{sybil safety} -- the inability of sybils to change the status quo against the will of the genuine agents, and \emph{sybil liveness} -- the ability of the genuine agents to change the status quo against the will of the sybils. We consider the social choice settings of deciding on a single proposal, on multiple proposals, and on updating a parameter. For each, we present social choice rules that are sybil-safe and, under certain conditions, satisfy sybil-liveness.
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(2018) Genome Biology. 19, 1, 63. Abstract
Three recent single-cell papers use novel CRISPR-Cas9-sgRNA genome editing methods to shed light on the zebrafish cell lineage tree.
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(2018) Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems. p. 1188-1192 (trueAAMAS '18). Abstract
When voting on a proposal one in fact chooses between two alternatives: (i) A new hypothetical social state depicted by the proposal and (ii) the status quo (henceforth: Reality); a Yes vote favors a transition to the proposed hypothetical state, while a No vote favors Reality. Social Choice theory generalizes voting on one proposal to ranking multiple proposals; that Reality was forsaken during this generalization is, in our view, inexplicable. Here we propose to rectify this neglect and incorporate Reality into Social Choice, distinguishing Reality from hypothesis. We show that doing so: (i) Offers a natural resolution to Condorcet's paradox; (ii) Explains what approval voters approve; (iii) Produces a simple and efficient Condorcet-consistent show-of-hands agenda; (iv) Produces democratic action plans, which start with Reality and proceed in democratically-supported transitions; and (v) Nullifies Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and hence abdicates Arrow's Theorem. Arrow's theorem was taken to show that democracy, conceived as government by the will of the people, is an incoherent illusion. Incorporating Reality into Social Choice may clear this intellectual blemish on democracy and offer a coherent, simple, efficient, easy to communicate, and trustworthy path forward to democracy.