Data & Society

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson discusses his book, The Rise of Big Data Policing, that critically examines data-driven surveillance technologies and their legal impact on everyday policing. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is professor of law at the University of the District of Columbia's David A. Clarke School of Law. He is a national expert on predictive policing, big data surveillance, and the fourth amendmen...

WTF? can be an expression of amazement or an expression of dismay. In today’s economy, we have far too much dismay along with our amazement, and technology bears some of the blame. In this combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action, Tim O’Reilly, Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual and the founder of O’Reilly Media, explores the upside and the potential downsides of today...

Kate Klonick talks about her recent article, "The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech", which provides one of the first analysis of what private online platforms are actually doing to moderate speech under a regulatory and First Amendment framework. It argues that to best understand online speech, we must abandon traditional doctrinal and regulatory an...

Joanna Radin discusses the writing of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton. Although Crichton is most famous for imagining an island of dinosaurs, metaphors in his non-fiction articles about computers that are even more terrifying. This talk was presented for the event Future Perfect. In a moment when the future increasingly feels like a foregone conclusion, Future Perfect brought actors from a v...

Ruha Benjamin's presentation entitled "designer and discarded genomes: experimenting with sociological imagination through speculative methods" uses speculative field notes to explore the antecedents and implications of the current era of genetic engineering. This talk was presented for the event Future Perfect. In a moment when the future increasingly feels like a foregone conclusion, F...

Suchana Seth speaks about different definitions of fairness in the context of machine learning. Suchana Seth is a physicist-turned-data scientist from India. She has built scalable data science solutions for startups and industry research labs, and holds patents in text mining and natural language processing. Suchana believes in the power of data to drive positive change, volunteers with DataKind,...

Ravi Shroff speaks about his research studying predictive models for decision-making in city and state government. Ravi Shroff is a Research Scientist at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), where he specializes in computational social science. His work involves using statistical and machine learning techniques to understand the criminal justice system, child welfare...

Anne Washington talks about the risks of efficiency and the need for a common language when speaking about data science and public policy. Anne L. Washington is a computer scientist and a librarian who specializes in public sector technology management and informatics. She is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University. As a digital government scholar, her research focuses on the production,...

Rebecca Wexler speaks about the dangers of Trade Secrets and Black-boxing Criminal Justice. Rebecca Wexler works with The Legal Aid Society to advocate for more lenient criminal discovery laws; draft legal motions to compel disclosure of data and source code for forensic technologies; and build partnerships with technology companies to facilitate a reasoned approach to defendants’ requests for use...

Daniel Grushkin speaks about the origin of GenSpace, The DNA Revolution, and merging data with biology. Daniel Grushkin is the Executive Director and cofounder of Genspace, a nonprofit community laboratory dedicated to promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology.

Alice Marwick speaks about Data & Society’s recent report on Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Alice Marwick leads the Media Manipulation project at Data & Society, and will join the Communication department at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in the Fall.

Whitney Philips and Ryan M. Milner explore the weird and mean and in-between that characterizes everyday expression online, from absurdist photoshops to antagonistic Twitter hashtags to ambivalent online play with the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Through these discussions, the book shows how digital media can help and harm, bring together and push apart, and make laugh and make angry in equal...

Eric Horvitz – Artificial intelligence (AI) is at an inflection point and is poised to move into the open world and into our lives in numerous ways that will have numerous influences on people and society. While AI promises to provide great value, along with the aspirations come concerns about inadvertent costs, rough edges, and failures. Concerns include failures of automation in the open world,...

Marie Hicks draws on the example of our closest historical cousin–the UK– to look at the ways in which computing initiatives often go wrong in unexpected ways at the national level. In 1944, the UK led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. This ta...

Sareeta Amrute, professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, describes her research on the professional and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor.

Maurizio Ferraris and Martin Scherzinger - Recent scandals around alternative facts, post-truth, and hacking have raised a constellation of questions regarding the intersection of digital tools, the construction or verification of reality, and issues of power and authorship. Such questions have been at the center of theoretical and literary discussions in continental philosophy and critical theory...

Meryl Alper- Mobile communication technologies are often hailed in the popular press and public policy as a means of “giving voice to the voiceless.” Behind the praise are determinist beliefs about technology as a gateway to opportunity, voice as a metaphor for agency and self-representation, and voicelessness as a stable and natural category. In this talk, based on her new book Giving Voice: Mobi...

Christina Agapakis, the creative director of Ginkgo Bioworks and one of the world’s first biodesigners, discusses biotechnology and feminism. In the early 2000s, a group of scientists from outside mainstream biology proposed that they would make living things behave like computers. They would treat DNA like command code; they would make cells behave with Boolean logic; and ultimately they would ma...

Tom Knight, considered the “godfather” of synthetic biology, discusses the origin of the scientific field and how it has evolved. In the early 2000s, a group of scientists from outside mainstream biology proposed that they would make living things behave like computers. They would treat DNA like command code; they would make cells behave with Boolean logic; and ultimately they would make life prog...

Amanda Lenhart is a Senior Research Scientist at the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Amanda was formerly a Researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute. At Data & Society, she led a Digital Trust Foundation-funded project examining the prevalence of cyberstalking and digital domestic abuse in the United States. Amanda has also been involved in Knight Foundation stu...

Jennifer Pan: The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called “50c party” posts vociferously argue...

Jeff Hammerbacher gives an overview of his work at Hammer Lab where he and his colleagues use data science to understand and improve the immune response to cancer. He also discusses the design of Hammer Lab, particularly focusing on ways that the lab is directly informed and motivated by his prior work experience at Bear Stearns, Facebook, and Cloudera. Jeff is an Assistant Professor at the Medica...

PANELISTS: JASON BOBE Jason Bobe is Associate Professor and Director of the Sharing Lab at Icahn Institute at Mount Sinai. For the past 10 years, Jason has been at the forefront of innovative data sharing practices in health research. His work on the Personal Genome Project at Harvard, and now three other countries, pioneered new approaches for creating well-consented public data, cell lines and o...

Sonia Livingstone on where and why do digital media – and digital media learning – fit into the lives of young teenagers living in complex urban societies? Do they help build valued connections, or enhance opportunities to create, learn and participate? Or do they lead to hyper-connection, surveillance and loss of privacy for young people? Reflecting on a year’s ethnography (free to read at http:/...

In this Databite, Neil Selwyn works through some emerging headline findings from a new three year study of digital technology use in Australian high schools. In particular Neil highlights the ways in which schools’ actual uses of technology often contradict presumptions of ‘connected learning’, ‘digital education’ and the like. Instead Neil considers… • how and why recent innovations such as maker...