Cool Logic

Sebastiaan Beschoor Plug (University College Utrecht)

Making Friends through Logic

May 11th at 18:00, in F1.15 ILLC seminar room

Need help making friends? Finding it hard to network? Or want to dive a bit into the theoretical bases of Facebook, and subsequently the methods of Cambridge Analytica? Then let this Cool Logic talk help you! Explore a logical perspective on social group creation and preference change.

We will go through a dynamic feature-based social-network change operator (as described in Smets & Velázquez-Quesada (2017)) and a social-network-based feature change operator (as described in Baltag, Christoff, Rendsvig, Smets (2016)). Lastly, we will study these in tandem—as the dynamics of one affects the other—in the hope of creating a new operator, one that more accurately represents the oftentimes cruel reality of making friends.

Digging a bit deeper, we will explore the threshold approach (where similarities attract), middleman approach (becoming friends with your friend’s friend), and maybe even some epistemic approaches. We will also discuss the limitations each model exhibits when compared to the real world.

We will not only get a look into recent publications by Fernando and Sonja, but also gain the know-how to sway election results—fun!

Afterwards, we will put our new found knowledge to the test, with drinks, snacks, and interesting conversations.