The book explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI), the technology to help make better data-driven decisions, can be made relevant for elections constructively. With 2024 being the year of elections as almost half the worlds population is experiencing elections, the need for accurate information for voters, candidates and other stakeholders could never have been greater. Concomitantly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the data-driven technologies that researchers have been working for over five decades to provide information may have been considered the right tool to rise to occasion and address the needs. But the sentiment around AI for elections is that of pessimism with fears of misinformation, bots and bad actors interfering with the democratic processes.
Our book, PROMISE, takes a counter, constructive look at how AI, supported by complimentary disciplines, may actually help improve the election process. The book contains contributions from experts from a variety of backgrounds including AI, security, journalism, business, law, political science, as perspectives, research papers and even an interview discussion, using the context of elections in US, India, Estonia, the UK, Brazil and Africa. They talk about the challenges, datasets and resources, techniques, global diversity, best practices, and a code of ethics for anyone working in the area inspired by complementary efforts in computing and journalism.
This book will serve as an important resource on election topics, AI techniques and trust methods for researchers, teachers, practitioners, students and government officials in their efforts to improve democratic electoral processes with technology. The book will assume that the reader is knowledgeable at high school level about one or more topics in civics and computing concepts. Sufficient background will be given by contributors to make the chapters self-contained and widely understandable.
1. Introduction: Elections Status Today from Multiple Perspectives.-
2. Challenges in Elections.-
3. Resources and AI Techniques for Elections.-
4. Perspectives on AI / data-driven technology usage.-
5. Best Practices and
Use cases.-
6. Code of ethics for elections across professions - computing/
journalism/ law.
Prof. Biplav Srivastava is a Professor of Computer Science at the AI Institute and Department of Computer Science at the University of South Carolina which he joined in 2020 after two decades in industrial research. He directs the 'AI for Society' group which is investigating how to enable people to make rational decisions despite the real world complexities of poor data, changing goals and limited resources by augmenting their cognitive limitations with technology. His work in Artificial Intelligence spans the sub-fields of reasoning (planning, scheduling), knowledge extraction and representation (ontology, open data), learning (classification, deep, adversarial) and interaction (collaborative assistants), and extends to their application for Services (process automation, composition) and Sustainability (water, traffic, health, governance). Biplav is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, AAAI Senior Member, IEEE Senior Member and AAAS Leshner Fellow for Public Engagement on AI (2020-2021).
Prof. Anita Nikolich is a Research Scientist and Director of Research and Technology Innovation and co-leads the DEFCON AI Village. She is a AAAS Leshner Fellow for Public Engagement on AI (2020-2021) and serves on the NSF advisory committee of cyberinfrastructure.
Prof. Andrea Hickerson is the Dean of the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi. She works in new media and misinformation.
Dr. Tarmo Koppel is a member of faculty at the Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. Tarmos work is interdisciplinary including information technologies, risk management, business administration, human factors, health and safety. His focus is on Artificial intelligence applications and digital transformation how technological advancements affect businesses, workers and the public, and what risks are related.
