Dear all,
We will have our next ONLINE LIRa on March 19th. Our speaker is Mina Young Pedersen, and you can find the details of her talk below. We will send you the zoom link on Wednesday, along with a reminder of the instructions, in case you have not used the zoom platform before. For those of you who attended the first online LIRa yesterday: if you have any feedback about it, please e-mail fernandorvelazquezq@gmail.com. We will take it into account for future sessions.
Speaker: Mina Young Pedersen
Date and Time: Thursday, March 19th 2020, 16:30-18:00
Venue: ONLINE
Title: Logical analyses of polarization and echo chambers
Abstract.
Recent literature has shown a growing interest for research in the interplay between logic and social network theory. One particularly prominent approach is to think of social relationships in terms of relations on a Kripke frame and use tools from various modal logics to reason about agents’ knowledge, characteristics and access to information.
This talk will be about two such logics in context of the social phenomena polarization and echo chambers. The first is a recent basic modal logic developed to analyze balance theory. We examine different extensions to its language to define previously undefinable frame properties and introduce distance measures to evaluate how far a network is from polarization. Then a novel two-sorted hybrid logic of strong and weak ties will be presented. We see that a known claim from social network analysis is a validity and relate it to echo chamber formation. We will also talk about threshold models, an epistemic modality and dynamic operators in this logical framework.
Hope to see you there!
The LIRa team