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Dr. Sofia Sahab
Specially Appointed Assistant Professor at Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University

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Research Keywords & Expertise

0 Collective Intelligence
0 Consensus Building
0 urban development
0 E-Participation
0 Conversational AI

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Short Biography

SOFIA SAHAB received the B.S. degree in architectural engineering from Kabul University in 2009, and M.E., and Doctor of Engineering Degrees in urban planning from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan, in 2014 and 2017, respectively. She is currently specially appointed assistant professor at Kyoto University, Japan. She previously worked as assistant professor with Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan, and Kabul University, Afghanistan. Her current research interests include participative decision support system, participatory urban planning, participatory e-planning, and civic technologies. She has published research articles in journals, such as Journal of Simulation and Gaming (SAGE Publications) and Journal of Architecture and Planning (Transections of Architectural Institute of Japan).

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Conference
Copenhagen, Netherland
Date: 29-30 June 2021
Attended:
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Sofia Sahab
Conference
Melbourne, Australia
Date: 14-17 December 2020
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Sofia Sahab
Article
Published: 25 May 2021 in Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering
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Artificial Intelligence is revolutionising our communication practices and the ways in which we interact with each other. This revolution does not only impact how we communicate, but it affects the nature of the partners with whom we communicate. Online discussion platforms now allow humans to communicate with artificial agents in the form of socialbots. Such agents have the potential to moderate online discussions and even manipulate and alter public opinions. In this paper, we propose to study this phenomenon using a constructed large-scale agent platform. At the heart of the platform lies an artificial agent that can moderate online discussions using argumentative messages. We investigate the influence of the agent on the evolution of an online debate involving human participants. The agent will dynamically react to their messages by moderating, supporting, or attacking their stances. We conducted two experiments to evaluate the platform while looking at the effects of the conversational agent. The first experiment is a large-scale discussion with 1076 citizens from Afghanistan discussing urban policy-making in the city of Kabul. The goal of the experiment was to increase the citizen involvement in implementing Sustainable Development Goals. The second experiment is a small-scale debate between a group of 16 students about globalisation and taxation in Myanmar. In the first experiment, we found that the agent improved the responsiveness of the participants and increased the number of identified ideas and issues. In the second experiment, we found that the agent polarised the debate by reinforcing the initial stances of the participant.

ACS Style

Rafik Hadfi; Jawad Haqbeen; Sofia Sahab; Takayuki Ito. Argumentative Conversational Agents for Online Discussions. Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering 2021, 1 -15.

AMA Style

Rafik Hadfi, Jawad Haqbeen, Sofia Sahab, Takayuki Ito. Argumentative Conversational Agents for Online Discussions. Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering. 2021; ():1-15.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Rafik Hadfi; Jawad Haqbeen; Sofia Sahab; Takayuki Ito. 2021. "Argumentative Conversational Agents for Online Discussions." Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering , no. : 1-15.

Journal article
Published: 13 May 2021 in Sustainability
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Planning a city is a systematic process that includes time, space, and groups of people who must communicate. However, due to security problems in such war-ravaged countries as Afghanistan, the traditional forms of public participation in the planning process are untenable. In particular, due to gathering space difficulties and culture issues in Afghanistan, women and religious minorities are restricted from joining male-dominated powerholders’ face-to-face meetings which are nearly always held in fixed places called masjids (religious buildings). Furthermore, conducting such discussions with human facilitation biases the generation of citizen decisions that stimulates an atmosphere of confrontation, causing another decision problem for urban policy-making institutions. Therefore, it is critical to find approaches that not only securely revolutionize participative processes but also provide meaningful and equal public consultation to support interactions among stakeholders to solve their shared problems together. Toward this end, we propose a joint research program, namely, crowd-based communicative and deliberative e-planning (CCDP), a blended approach, which is a mixture of using an artificial-intelligence-led technology, decision-support system called D-Agree and experimental participatory planning in Kabul, Afghanistan. For the sake of real-world implementation, Nagoya Institute of Technology (Japan) and Kabul Municipality (Afghanistan) have formed a novel developed and developing world partnership by using our proposed methodology as an emerging-deliberation mechanism to reframe public participation in urban planning processes. In the proposed program, Kabul municipality agreed to use our methodology when Kabul city needs to make a plan with people. This digital field study presents the first practical example of using online decision support systems in the context of the neighborhood functions of Gozars, which are Kabul’s social and spatial urban units. The main objective was to harness the wisdom of the crowd to innovative suggestions for helping policymakers making strategic development plans for Gozars using open call ideas, and for responding to equal participation and consultation needs, specifically for women and minorities. This article presents valuable insights into the benefits of this combined approach as blended experience for societies and cities that are suffering long-term distress. This initiative has influenced other local Afghan governments, including the cities of Kandahar and Herat as well as the country’s central government’s ministry of urban planning and land, which has officially expressed its intention to collaborate with us.

ACS Style

Jawad Haqbeen; Sofia Sahab; Takayuki Ito; Paola Rizzi. Using Decision Support System to Enable Crowd Identify Neighborhood Issues and Its Solutions for Policy Makers: An Online Experiment at Kabul Municipal Level. Sustainability 2021, 13, 5453 .

AMA Style

Jawad Haqbeen, Sofia Sahab, Takayuki Ito, Paola Rizzi. Using Decision Support System to Enable Crowd Identify Neighborhood Issues and Its Solutions for Policy Makers: An Online Experiment at Kabul Municipal Level. Sustainability. 2021; 13 (10):5453.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Jawad Haqbeen; Sofia Sahab; Takayuki Ito; Paola Rizzi. 2021. "Using Decision Support System to Enable Crowd Identify Neighborhood Issues and Its Solutions for Policy Makers: An Online Experiment at Kabul Municipal Level." Sustainability 13, no. 10: 5453.

Research article
Published: 29 January 2020 in Simulation & Gaming
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Background. The rights conversion is an emerging approach on international cooperation that aims to solve the urban renewal problems in the 21st century. Previous research centred on the development of a rights-conversion-type urban redevelopment project game (URPG) for rights holders considering a project in Japan. Here, we focus on the application of URPG into Kabul City in Afghanistan, being presented with an opportunity for transfer by interuniversity collaboration. We introduce a gaming exercise herein as part of an action research to solve Kabul’s current urban renewal problems. Aim. Our paper is especially focused on the international transfer of the URPG. The content includes the background, process and formalisation of the rights conversion and reports on the outline of the two versions of URPG and a play content analysis of the Kabul version. It also mentions the implications of international differences in social systems highlighted from the episodes of the debriefing. Method. Our action research is evolved from the soft system approach by adding the gaming exercise, which is regarded as its main component. Results. The implications of the action research are summarised as follows: (1) URPG is a game that deals with the core mechanism of the rights conversion. Herein, we confirmed the basic performance of the Kabul version for undergraduate education in specialised courses. (2) Through a debriefing discussion, we revealed the cultural differences for rights notions on lands, which were subsequently taken into the legislative preparation of the rights conversion by the Afghanistan government. (3) Moreover, we revealed that URPG can deal with a project implementation problem in a given case, although the institutional design of the legislative project framework is a significant problem. Thus, a new gaming exercise based on these two-layered formulations is required.

ACS Style

Toshiyuki Kaneda; Mingji Cui; Sofia Sahab; Ahmad Ramin Sadiq. Gaming Exercise for Rights-Conversion-Type Urban Redevelopment Project in International Cooperation Context. Simulation & Gaming 2020, 51, 212 -242.

AMA Style

Toshiyuki Kaneda, Mingji Cui, Sofia Sahab, Ahmad Ramin Sadiq. Gaming Exercise for Rights-Conversion-Type Urban Redevelopment Project in International Cooperation Context. Simulation & Gaming. 2020; 51 (2):212-242.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Toshiyuki Kaneda; Mingji Cui; Sofia Sahab; Ahmad Ramin Sadiq. 2020. "Gaming Exercise for Rights-Conversion-Type Urban Redevelopment Project in International Cooperation Context." Simulation & Gaming 51, no. 2: 212-242.

Journal article
Published: 01 January 2015 in Journal of Architecture and Planning (Transactions of AIJ)
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ACS Style

Sofia Sahab; Toshiyuki Kaneda. A STUDY ON NEIGHBORHOOD FUNCTIONS OF ‘GOZARS’ IN KABUL, AFGHANISTAN. Journal of Architecture and Planning (Transactions of AIJ) 2015, 80, 2253 -2260.

AMA Style

Sofia Sahab, Toshiyuki Kaneda. A STUDY ON NEIGHBORHOOD FUNCTIONS OF ‘GOZARS’ IN KABUL, AFGHANISTAN. Journal of Architecture and Planning (Transactions of AIJ). 2015; 80 (716):2253-2260.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Sofia Sahab; Toshiyuki Kaneda. 2015. "A STUDY ON NEIGHBORHOOD FUNCTIONS OF ‘GOZARS’ IN KABUL, AFGHANISTAN." Journal of Architecture and Planning (Transactions of AIJ) 80, no. 716: 2253-2260.