Digital Governance Systems Laboratory
In the Digital Governance Systems Lab we are interested in how ICTs can be applied to improve the delivery of public services and ultimately the quality of living. Taking context and ethical considerations into account, we study the design of such systems, build them or work with the data they generate
Voting Advice Applications
VAAs are online civic tech tools used by potential voters during an election campaign. They provide users with recommendations on candidates or political parties that are closest to their own political leanings. NLP can support VAA designers to a) formulate statements and to b) help them with stance prediction.
Online Petition Systems
Governments across the globe are re-thinking how to interact with citizens, harnessing the wisdom of the crowd. One such digital co-creation tool gaining popularity are online petition portals. ML models can be trained and optimized to classify which of the petitions are getting admitted.
Internet Voting Applications
One of the few countries besides Estonia currently experimenting with internet voting is Switzerland. So far lab members analyzed vote register data and experimented with the internet voting system baloti.
Event Participation Network Data
Governmental decision-making processes generate event-participation network data. The goal is to use ML to predict project duration and success, focusing on actor relationships and project characteristics as the key features.
Blockchain Technology and DAOs
Distributed ledgers commonly known as blockchain technology as well as distributed autonomous organizations (DAO) will also affect the way how public administrations operate. We can study different ways of decision-making and consensus mechanisms as well as their effets on public governance.
Measuring Digitalization
There are several indexes trying to capture digitalisation per country, eg by the UN, World Bank etc. It takes considerable time and expertise to gather such data. Rule based information retrieval could be a way forward to achieve more efficient measurement.
Professor
Research Areas: Digital Governance Systems, Digital Democracy, E-Government Applications, E-Participation
Assistant Professor
Research Areas: Natural Language Processing, Digital Governance, e-Democracy, Data Mining, Deep Learning
Assistant Professor
Research Areas: operations research, systems optimization, evolutionary computation, and text mining
Interested in our research?
We are looking for motivated students and researchers to join our team. If you are interested in our research topics, please contact us here: serdult at fc.ritsumei.ac.jp. Potential master or PhD students are required to send along a research idea that fits with the lab’s research themes. Without such a document, we will not respond to your email.