I am assistant professor in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Groningen, and a member of the Multi-Agent Systems Group. I am also the recipient of a NWO VENI grant for my ongoing research project “Social Networks and Democracy”.

My research focuses on formal models of social influence and social network phenomena and on collective opinion formation and decision making, at the interface between logic, artificial intelligence, network theory, social epistemology, and social choice theory. I’m also interested in modal logics, graph theory, social psychology, formal learning theory, philosophy of science, self-reference problems, and limitative results in logic.

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bio

I have been in Groningen since September 2020. Before my current position, I was a postdoctoral researcher in epistemic logic and social epistemology at the Department of  Philosophy of the University of Bayreuth (Germany), as a member of the project “From Shared Evidence to Group Attitudes” led by Olivier Roy.

Before that, I was already a postdoc at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Liverpool, as a member of Davide Grossi‘s project “Foundations of Opinion Formation in Autonomous Systems”, where we started bridging judgment aggregation theory and social network analysis (see our paper on liquid democracy, and our paper on stabilization of opinion diffusion).

My PhD thesis, Dynamics Logics of Networks: Information Flow and the Spread of Opinion, applies logical tools to collective behavior and diffusion in social networks. It was written under the supervision of Johan van Benthem and Sonja Smets at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam. The thesis focuses on information and opinion dynamics in social contexts.

The first half introduces logical modelling of social phenomena involving correlated opinions in groups, such as informational cascades (see my paper) and pluralistic ignorance (see my paper). For an informal introduction to my work on collective failures, see this interview for the newspaper Trouw (in Dutch).

The second half focuses on diffusion processes in networks, from different angles. First, I propose a general logical framework to reason about diffusion (see paper). Second, I model how information interferes with diffusion (see paper), and vice versa (see paper). Third, I investigate from a logical perspective, how network structures constrain diffusion dynamics in the limit (see for instance this paper).

Before my PhD in Amsterdam, I worked as a Teaching Assistant in Logic at the Philosophy Department of the University of Geneva where I obtained my MA under the supervision of Pascal Engel, Fabrice Correia and Kevin Mulligan.