Collective Information

Many challenging problems of scientific, technological, and societal significance require us to aggregate information supplied by multiple agents into a single piece of information of the same type—the collective information representing the stance of the group as a whole. Examples include expressive forms of voting and democratic decision making (where citizens supply information regarding their preferences), peer evaluation (where participants supply information in the form of assessments of their peers), and crowdsourcing (where volunteers supply information by annotating data). In this position paper, I outline the challenge of modelling, handling, and analysing all of these diverse instances of collective information using a common methodology. Addressing this challenge will facilitate a transfer of knowledge between different application domains, thereby enabling progress in all of them.