Social choice studies ordinal preference and information aggregation with applications in high-stakes political elections as well as low-stakes movie rating websites. Recently, computational aspects of classical social choice mechanisms have been extensively investigated, yet not much has been done in designing new mechanisms with the help of computational techniques. In this paper, we outline ...

OBJECTIVE The authors critically surveyed several preclinical and clinical neurobiological models of social anxiety disorder. METHOD The authors reviewed the recent literature regarding three animal models of particular relevance to social anxiety. They then examined the recent literature concerning clinical neurobiological aspects of social anxiety disorder, including the developmental neuro...

There has been relatively little research on the psychological mechanisms of social learning. This may be due, in part, to the practice of distinguishing categories of social learning in relation to ill-defined mechanisms (Davis, 1973; Galef, 1988). This practice both makes it difficult to identify empirically examples of different types of social learning, and gives the false impression that t...

Most previous research on statistical approaches to social choice focused on the computation and characterization of maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) of various parametric ranking models. In this paper, we take a traditional statistical approach by evaluating social choice mechanisms w.r.t. two important statistical criteria: (1) consistency, a minimum requirement for reasonable estimators, ...

Spoken dialogue systems are increasingly being used to facilitate and enhance human communication. While these interactive systems can process the linguistic aspects of human communication, they are not yet capable of processing the complex dynamics involved in social interaction. Conversational interaction is a complex dynamic and joint activity where all speakers participate in the constructi...

The article by Labonté, Schram, and Ruckert is a significant and timely analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) policy and the severe threats to public health that it implies for 12 Pacific Rim populations from the Americas and Asia (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam). With careful and analytic precision t...

In this article we propose a computational model that describes how observed behavior can influence an observer’s own behavior, including the acquisition of new task descriptions. The sources of influence on our model’s behavior are: beliefs about the world’s possible states and actions causing transitions between them; baseline preferences for certain actions; a variable tendency to infer and ...

Editor's Note: These short, critical reviews of recent papers in the Journal, written exclusively by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, are intended to summarize the important findings of the paper and provide additional insight and commentary. For more information on the format and purpose of the Journal Club, please see Adolescence is characterized by a unique set of physical, hormona...

Throughout the past decade there has been extensive research on algorithmic and data mining techniques for solving the problem of influence maximization in social networks: if one can convince a subset of individuals to influence their friends to adopt a new product or technology, which subset should be selected so that the spread of influence in the social network is maximized? Despite the pro...