Augmenting Public Deliberations through Stream Argument Analytics and Visualisations

Public deliberations are organised by governments and other large institutions to take the views of citizens around controversial issues. Increasing public demand and the associated burden on public funding make the quality of public deliberation events and their outcomes critical to modern democracies. This paper focuses on technology developed around streams of computational argument data intended to inform and improve deliberative communication in real time. Combining state-of-the-art speech recognition, argument mining, and analytics, we produce dynamic, interactive visualisations intended for non-experts, deployed incrementally in real time to deliberation participants via large screens, hand-held and personal computing devices. The goal is to bridge the gap between theoretical criteria on deliberation quality from the political sciences and objective analytics calculated automatically from computable argument data in actual public deliberations, presented as a set of visualisations which work on stream data and are simple, yet informative enough to make a positive impact on deliberative outcomes

ADD-up:Visual analytics for augmented deliberative democracy

We demonstrate the first prototype of the ADD-up visual analytics system. The Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD-up) project aims to enhance public deliberations by providing argument analytics in real time. The system will ultimately take a stenographic feed of a public deliberation meeting, automatically extract the arguments therein and project visual analytics intended to improve the deliberative quality of the event.publishe

Diastereospecific Bis-alkoxycarbonylation of 1,2-Disubstituted Olefins Catalyzed by Aryl α-Diimine Palladium(II) Catalysts

Readily synthesized aryl α-diimine derivatives have been used as efficient ligands for the palladium-catalyzed oxidative bis-alkoxycarbonylation reaction of 1,2-disubstituted olefins. The most active catalyst A was formed in situ from bis-(2,6-dimethylphenyl)-2,3-dimethyl-1,4-diazabutadiene and Pd(TFA)2 (TFA=trifluoroacetate). This catalytic system was able to selectively convert 1,2-disubstituted olefins into 2,3-disubstituted-succinic diesters with total diastereospecificity, in good yields (up to 97%) with 2 mol% of catalyst loading, under mild reaction conditions (4 bar of CO at 20 °C in presence of p- toluenesulfonic acid as additive and p-benzoquinone as oxidant). The optimized reaction conditions could be successfully applied to 1,2-disubstituted aromatic, aliphatic, cyclic olefins and to unsaturated fatty acid methyl esters, employing methanol or benzyl alcohol as nucleophiles. The use of the bulky, less reactive isopropyl alcohol has allowed to better understand the mechanisms involved in the catalytic process. The geometry of the carbonylated products can be explained as a consequence of a concerted syn addition of the Pd-alkoxycarbonyl moiety to the olefin C=C bond. Catalyst A was isolated, characterized and analyzed by single crystal X-ray diffraction analysis. (Figure presented.)

Terpolymerisation of 1-olefin and ethene with CO catalysed by the [PdCl2(dppp)] complex in methanol as a solvent [dppp = 1,3-bis(diphenylphosphino)propane]

The catalytic activity of the [PdCl2(dppp)] complex in the 1-olefin/ethene (E)/CO terpolymerisation has been studied in MeOH (containing 1000 ppm of H2O) as a solvent. The 1-olefins tested were propene (P), 1-hexene (Hex), 1-decene (D) and styrene (S). At 90 °C and 45 atm (E/CO = 1/1), the system [PdCl2(dppp)]/TsOH (p-toluenesulfonic acid) = 1/8 catalyses efficiently the reactions leading to 5000 g PECO/(g Pd h), 5600 g HexECO/(g Pd h), 5650 g DECO/(g Pd h) and 4100 g SECO/(g Pd h). In particular, it has been studied deeper the effect of Hex and S concentrations on productivities, average molecular weights and melting temperatures of HexECO and SECO, respectively. A mechanism of reaction has been also proposed and discussed, supported by IR, and NMR characterizations