Title
Towards Hyperdemocracy: Crowd-scale Discussion Support by AI Agents.

Abstract
Online discussion among civilians is important and essential for next-generation democracy. Providing good support is critical for establishing and maintaining coherent discussions. Large-scale online discussion platforms are receiving great attention as potential next-generation methods for smart democratic citizen platforms. Such platforms require support functions that can efficiently achieve a consensus, reasonably integrate ideas, and discourage flaming. Researchers are developing several crowd-scale discussion platforms and conducting social experiments with a local government. One of these studies employed human facilitators in order to achieve good discussion. However, they clarified the critical problem faced by human facilitators caused by the difficulty of facilitating large-scale online discussions. In this work, we propose an automated facilitation agent to manage crowd-scale online discussions. An automated facilitator agent extracts the discussion structure from the texts posted in discussions by people. We conducted a large-scale social experiment with Nagoya City's local government.

Biodata
Dr. Takayuki ITO is a Professor at Kyoto University. He received a B.E., M.E, and Doctor of Engineering from the Nagoya Institute of Technology in 1995, 1997, and 2000, respectively. From 1999 to 2001, he was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). From 2000 to 2001, he was a visiting researcher at USC/ISI (University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute). From April 2001 to March 2003, he was an associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). From April 2004 to March 2013, he was an associate professor at the Nagoya Institute of Technology. From April 2014 to September 2020, he was a professor at the Nagoya Institute of Technology. Since October 2020, he has been a professor at Kyoto University.

From 2005 to 2006, he was a visiting researcher at the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, and a visiting researcher at the Center for Coordination Science, MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2008 to 2010, he was a visiting researcher at the Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2017 to 2018, he was an invited researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Center of AIST, JAPAN. From March 5, 2019, he is the CTO of AgreeBit, inc.

He was a board member of IFAAMAS, Steering Committee Chair of PRIMA, Steering Committee Member of PRICAI, Executive Committee Member of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics, the PC-chair of AAMAS2013, PRIMA2009, the Local Arrangements Chair of IJCAI-PRICAI2020, General-Chair of PRICAI2024, PRIMA2024, PRIMA2020, PRIMA2014. He was an SPC/PC member in many top-level conferences (IJCAI, AAMAS, ECAI, AAAI, etc). He received the JSAI (Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence) Contribution Award, the JSAI Achievement Award, the JSPS Prize, 2014, the Prize for Science and Technology (Research Category), The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, 2013, the Young Scientists' Prize, The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, 2007, the Nagao Special Research Award of the Information Processing Society of Japan, 2007, the Best Paper Award of AAMAS2006, the 2005 Best Paper Award from Japan Society for Software Science and Technology, the Best Paper Award in the 66th annual conference of 66th Information Processing Society of Japan, and the Super Creator Award of 2004 IPA Exploratory Software Creation Projects. He is the principal investigator of the Japan Cabinet Funding Program for Next Generation World-Leading Researchers (NEXT Program). Further, he has several companies handling web-based and enterprise-distributed systems. His main research interests include multi-agent systems, intelligent agents, collective intelligence, group decision support systems, etc.