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I am an Assistant Professor at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig Maximilian University, for the Chair of Philosophy of Science. Before that, I was a Research Fellow at the Philosophy Department of the Australian National University, where I joined after concluding my Philosophy Doctorate at Columbia University in 2019.
My areas of specialization are Social Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
Academic Curriculum Vitae
I have done work in formal epistemology, computational social sciences and the philosophy of AI. My current focus is on the concept of digital social norms and on cooperative artificial intelligence. I do this by both looking at (online) behavioral data and building multi agent reinforcement learning based models. Go to the research tab for a more detailed and academic presentation of my research project.
Social norms are devices that maintain social order by promoting and sustaining cooperation. The rise of digital environments is profoundly transforming key aspects of our lives, reshaping how we interact with one another. Changes in social norms of political engagement explain polarization, norms of assertion can curtail misinformation, norms concerning personal relationships can contribute to tribalism. However, there has been almost no research done on digital social norms. To effectively mitigate the harms and make the best out of these new technologies, we need to have a clear philosophical understanding and modeling of the social norms that regulate our digital world. This is not easy. Although we have access to large datasets of human behavior online, the observation of social patterns in descriptive data is not enough to explain the normative force of social norms. Conversely, our best formal and simulation models have no clear empirical base, and are supported only by the strength of their normative idealizations and assumptions. They constitute highly speculative ‘how possibly’ accounts of phenomena, and remain very distant from ‘how actually’ accounts.
A further topic that I have been working on is Cooperative AI, an emergent field that focuses on improving the cooperative intelligence of advanced systems. We have built autonomous agents have successfully outperform humans in zero-sum games like chess, go, or Starcraft; but the focus has not been on cooperative games. Furthermore, the social dimension of intelligence has also been neglected. Much of the human evolutionary success is based in our capacity to unexpectedly cooperate in scenarios like the prisoner's dilemma, ultimatum game, or public goods game; a natural ability artificial agents are only recently learning. Progress in artificial intelligence depends on our improved computational understanding of the social world.
My Google Scholar
My LinkedIn.
My GitHub.
Feel free to see the other pages for more information!
I am an Assistant Professor at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig Maximilian University, for the Chair of Philosophy of Science. Before that, I was a Research Fellow at the Philosophy Department of the Australian National University, where I joined after concluding my Philosophy Doctorate at Columbia University in 2019.
My areas of specialization are Social Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
Academic Curriculum Vitae
I have done work in formal epistemology, computational social sciences and the philosophy of AI. My current focus is on the concept of digital social norms and on cooperative artificial intelligence. I do this by both looking at (online) behavioral data and building multi agent reinforcement learning based models. Go to the research tab for a more detailed and academic presentation of my research project.
Social norms are devices that maintain social order by promoting and sustaining cooperation. The rise of digital environments is profoundly transforming key aspects of our lives, reshaping how we interact with one another. Changes in social norms of political engagement explain polarization, norms of assertion can curtail misinformation, norms concerning personal relationships can contribute to tribalism. However, there has been almost no research done on digital social norms. To effectively mitigate the harms and make the best out of these new technologies, we need to have a clear philosophical understanding and modeling of the social norms that regulate our digital world. This is not easy. Although we have access to large datasets of human behavior online, the observation of social patterns in descriptive data is not enough to explain the normative force of social norms. Conversely, our best formal and simulation models have no clear empirical base, and are supported only by the strength of their normative idealizations and assumptions. They constitute highly speculative ‘how possibly’ accounts of phenomena, and remain very distant from ‘how actually’ accounts.
A further topic that I have been working on is Cooperative AI, an emergent field that focuses on improving the cooperative intelligence of advanced systems. We have built autonomous agents have successfully outperform humans in zero-sum games like chess, go, or Starcraft; but the focus has not been on cooperative games. Furthermore, the social dimension of intelligence has also been neglected. Much of the human evolutionary success is based in our capacity to unexpectedly cooperate in scenarios like the prisoner's dilemma, ultimatum game, or public goods game; a natural ability artificial agents are only recently learning. Progress in artificial intelligence depends on our improved computational understanding of the social world.
My Google Scholar
My LinkedIn.
My GitHub.
Feel free to see the other pages for more information!
Contact: ignacio.ojea[at]lmu.de
