Joshua C. Yang

Hello 👋🏽 I am Josh, a postdoc researcher at ETH Zurich 🇨🇭 investigating how AI can be designed to serve society, and democracy in particular (yes, a pro-active take). I finished my PhD in summer 2025 and decided this mission was far too interesting to stop.

Coming from Computer Science, I approach my research through the lens of responsible and societal AI, combining insights from Complex Systems, Computational Social Choice, and Human-Computer Interaction. My research moves in two main directions. The first focuses on Digital Democracy, studying how methods such as agentic AI, LLMs, voting algorithms and recommender systems can support how people vote, deliberate, and make collective decisions. The second explores AI Pluralistic Alignment, developing ways for AI systems to understand and represent diverse human values rather than converging on a single viewpoint.

I try to bring my research to the real world as much as possible. I frequently advise governments and organisations on their digital participatory processes. In Switzerland, I have worked closely with the city of Aarau on the StadtIdee Participatory Budgeting program and also Kultur Komitee Winterthur in their annual citizen assembly to fund art and cultural projects.

Outside of work, I am an active member in the Taiwanese 🇹🇼 civic tech g0v community, participating mainly in the vTaiwan project, using AI & digital tools to find consensus among the public in multistakeholder governance. We are constantly exploring new tools and methods that enhance deliberation and consensus finding.

During my Computer Science (NLP) master’s at the University of Melbourne 🇦🇺, I conducted fieldwork in the Northern Territory, focusing on Speech Recognition for Indigenous languages. My research explored a human-in-the-loop transcription pipeline that combined respeaking and word-spotting to improve recognition for endangered Indigenous languages.

I was born in Australia and grew up in Taiwan. I speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent, English with an Australian one, and a few words of Swiss German reserved exclusively for SBB train inspectors.

I’m based in Zürich and would love to connect if you find yourself in this part of the world! 🥾

news

Oct 01, 2025	I became a postdoc in the Computational Social Science team at ETH Zurich! (Feeling old now) 🥸
Jun 30, 2025	I successfully defended my PhD thesis “Designing Computational Methods for Digital Democracy” at ETH Zurich. 🎓
Mar 01, 2025	I implemented the algorithm for another year of Kultur Komitee Winterthur and developed a framework Komitee Equal Shares that allowed 400,000 CHF to be distributed using both group discussion and individual votes.
Apr 17, 2024	Kultur Komitee Winterthur 2024 has concluded. Among the 400,000 CHF budget, half was distributed using the Method of Equal Shares using an interactive webpage in the citizen assembly.

latest posts

Jun 30, 2025	Living Democracy from Australia, Taiwan to Switzerland

selected publications

AIES
LLM Voting: Human Choices and AI Collective Decision Making

Joshua C Yang, Marcin Korecki, Damian Dailisan, Carina I Hausladen, and Dirk Helbing

In 7th AAAI Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society , 2024

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This paper explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can participate in and support human collective decision making. Through experiments comparing human and LLM voting behaviors, the work investigates alignment, bias, and interpretability in AI-assisted democratic processes.
@inproceedings{yang2024llm, title = {LLM Voting: Human Choices and AI Collective Decision Making}, author = {Yang, Joshua C and Korecki, Marcin and Dailisan, Damian and Hausladen, Carina I and Helbing, Dirk}, booktitle = {7th AAAI Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society}, year = {2024}, }
ACM
Designing Digital Voting Systems for Citizens: Achieving Fairness and Legitimacy in Participatory Budgeting

Joshua C Yang, Carina I Hausladen, Dominik Peters, Evangelos Pournaras, Regula Hänggli Fricker, and Dirk Helbing

Digital Government: Research and Practice, 2024

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Participatory Budgeting (PB) has evolved into a key democratic instrument for resource allocation in cities. This study identifies how digital design choices influence citizens’ perceptions of fairness and legitimacy in PB voting systems.
@article{yang2024designing, title = {Designing Digital Voting Systems for Citizens: Achieving Fairness and Legitimacy in Participatory Budgeting}, author = {Yang, Joshua C and Hausladen, Carina I and Peters, Dominik and Pournaras, Evangelos and H{\"a}nggli Fricker, Regula and Helbing, Dirk}, journal = {Digital Government: Research and Practice}, volume = {5}, number = {3}, pages = {1--30}, year = {2024}, publisher = {ACM}, url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665332}, }
ACM
Bridging Voting and Deliberation with Algorithms: Field Insights from vTaiwan and Kultur Komitee

Joshua C Yang, and Fynn Bachmann

In ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) , 2025

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Based on field experiments in Taiwan and Switzerland, this paper presents hybrid algorithmic designs that integrate deliberation and voting for digital democracy.
@inproceedings{yang2025bridging, title = {Bridging Voting and Deliberation with Algorithms: Field Insights from vTaiwan and Kultur Komitee}, author = {Yang, Joshua C and Bachmann, Fynn}, booktitle = {ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT)}, year = {2025}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05017}, }
arXiv
Komitee Equal Shares: Choosing Together as Voters and as Groups with a Co-Designed Virtual Budget Algorithm

Joshua C Yang, and Noemi Scheurer

2025

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A detailed case study of the Winterthur 2025 Kultur Komitee participatory budgeting process, introducing the Komitee Equal Shares (KES) algorithm for co-designed group decision making.
@misc{yang2025komitee, title = {Komitee Equal Shares: Choosing Together as Voters and as Groups with a Co-Designed Virtual Budget Algorithm}, author = {Yang, Joshua C and Scheurer, Noemi}, journal = {Working Paper}, url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02040}, year = {2025}, }