Fabricio Vasselai, a dual Ph. D. candidate in Political Science and Scientific Computing is a recipient of this year’s Horowitz Foundation awards from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. His proposal titled “Elections in the AI era: using Machine Learning and Multi-Agent Systems to detect and study menaces to election integrity” won the Irving Louis Horowitz Award, given to the overall most outstanding project of the year, as well as the Joshua Feigenbaum Award as the most outstanding project on Arts, Popular Culture and Mass Communication.
The proposal develops Artificial Intelligence tools to detect and to study threats to election integrity. First, novel Multi-agent simulations of elections (MASE) are derived and implemented to be the data-generating process of synthetic data. Then these data is used to train Supervised Machine Learning (SML) to detect fraud in real election result counts. He uses such ability to create simulated training data to properly bootstrap the SML classifications, allowing for the novel estimation of uncertainty around election fraud detection. He also uses MASE to perform virtual experiments on the spread of fake news, showing that biased misinformation is critical for political polarization to flourish in majoritarian elections.
Fabricio Vasselai is an MICDE Fellow (awarded on 2018), and he is currently a Researcher at U-M’s Center for Political Studies and Center for Complex Systems.
Established in 1998, the Horowitz Foundation awards grants to scholars to assist them in completing their dissertations. It is highly competitive, with less than 3 percent of applicants receiving an award this year.