Ezra Systems Seminar: Anastasia Bizyaeva (Cornell MAE)

Description

Nonlinear dynamics of social decision-making and belief formation

Motivated by the study of complex social behavior, and by the bottom-up design of collaborative social autonomy, in the presented work we present and analyze a nonlinear model of social belief dynamics. In our modeling framework, belief updates of individuals are informed by the complex interplay of external factors, i.e. social network effects, and internal factors, i.e. internal biases, networked relationships between an individual's belief representations, and nonlinear processing of social information. Our analysis sheds light on mechanistic principles that allow groups overcome deadlocks to form strong beliefs when it is urgent to do so, on how the structure of social relationships and of the underlying belief system shapes social decisions in the group, and on the effects of individual predispositions and local information on shaping a global decision. This work provides novel insights into the dynamics of complex social systems in nature and society and motivates a new approach for the design of distributed behavior in engineered networks of social agents.
 

Bio: Anastasia Bizyaeva joined the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty as an assistant professor in July 2024. Prior to this, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the AI Institute in Dynamic Systems at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University in September 2022 and her B.A. in physics with a minor in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016.