Publications

Publication date: 2019

Modern data-driven technologies are providing new capabilities for working with data across diverse storage architectures and analyzing it in unified frameworks to yield powerful insights. These new analysis capabilities, which rely on correlating data across sources and types and exploiting statistical structure, have challenged classical approaches to privacy, leading to a need for radical...

Publication date: 2019

At a time when globalization is taking a step backward, what’s the best way to organize a global enterprise? The key, explains political economist Steven Weber, is to prepare for a world increasingly made up of competing regions defined by their own rules and standards.

Globalization has taken a hit as trade wars and resistance to mass migrations dominate headlines....

Publication date: 2019

Collecting data to inform policy decisions is an ongoing global challenge. While some data collection has become routine, certain populations remain difficult to reach. From targeting social protection programs in densely-populated urban areas to reaching the "last mile" of infrastructure coverage, data collection and service delivery go hand-in-hand. Understanding the populations that live in...

Publication date: 2019

Three studies assessed the relationship between need for closure (NFC) and evaluations of political ideology conversions as a function of mortality salience (MS). Following anexperimental (vs. control) manipulation, 156 participants evaluated politicians who switchedpolitical ideologies. Results indicate that MS induced people high in NFC to express greater support for politicians seeking...

Publication date: 2019

In a world instrumented with smart sensors and digital platforms, some of our most intimate and information-rich data are being collected and curated by private companies. The opportunities and risks derived from potential knowledge carried within these data streams are undeniable, and the clustering of data within the private sector is challenging traditional data infrastructures and sites of...

Publication date: 2019

In this pictorial, we explore how emergent menstrual biosensing technologies compound existing concerns for the everyday ethics of extracting and analyzing intimate data. Specifically, we review the data practices of a set of existing menstrual tracking applications and use that analysis to inform the design of speculative near future technologies. We present these technologies here in the...

Publication date: 2019

Biosensors-devices that sense the human body-are increasingly ubiquitous. However, it is unclear how people evaluate the risks associated with their use, in part because it is not well-understood what people believe these sensors can reveal. In this study, participants ranked biosensors by how likely they are to reveal what a person is thinking and feeling. We report quantitative and...

Publication date: 2019

In calls for privacy by design (PBD), regulators and privacy scholars have investigated the richness of the concept of "privacy." In contrast, "design" in HCI is comprised of rich and complex concepts and practices, but has received much less attention in the PBD context. Conducting a literature review of HCI publications discussing privacy and design, this paper articulates a set of...

Publication date: 2019

Word clouds continue to be a popular tool for summarizing textual information, despite their well-documented deficiencies for analytic tasks. Much of their popularity rests on their playful visual appeal. In this paper, we present the results of a series of controlled experiments that show that layouts in which words are arranged into semantically and visually distinct zones are more effective...

Publication date: 2019

In this moment of rising nationalism worldwide, governments, civil society groups, transnational companies, and web users all complain of increasing regional fragmentation online. While prior work in this area has primarily focused on issues of government censorship and regulatory compliance, we use an inductive and qualitative approach to examine targeted blocking by corporate entities of...

Publication date: 2018

What can machines know about the mind, even theoretically? This dissertation examines what people (end-users and software engineers) believe the answer to this question might be, where these beliefs come from, and what effect they have on social behavior and technical practice. First, qualitative and quantitative data from controlled experiments show how basic biosignals, such as heartrate,...

Publication date: 2018

‘Financial Inclusion’ has over the years assumed a central role in poverty alleviation by connecting the materially poor with formal financial services. Access to these formal financial services is expected to help the poor manage their erratic income streams and thus manage their day-to-day and critical expenses. In this way, the financial inclusion narrative assumes that the poor around the...

Publication date: 2018

Machine learning algorithms have started having an unprecedented impact on human society due to their improved accuracy. The ability to collect and analyze information at a large scale has enabled the researchers to develop novel algorithms that can beat the best of the human experts in quite a few cases. The size of the data and the quality of the data has been the primary factor behind the...

Publication date: 2018

We investigate cybersecurity toolkits, collections of public facing materials intended to help users achieve security online. Through a qualitative analysis of 41 online toolkits, we present a set of key design dimensions: agentive scale (who is responsible for security), achievability (can security be achieved), and interventional stage (when are security measures taken). Recognizing toolkits...

Publication date: 2018

This paper examines the history of the learning theory "constructionism" and its most well-known implementation, Logo, to examine beliefs involving both "C's" in CSCW: computers and cooperation. Tracing the tumultuous history of one of the first examples of computer-supported cooperative learning (CSCL) allows us to question some present-day assumptions regarding the universal appeal of...

Publication date: 2018

We introduce a model which combines principles from psychometric and connectionist paradigms to allow direct Q-matrix refinement via backpropagation. We call this model dAFM, based on augmentation of the original Additive Factors Model (AFM), whose calculations and constraints we show can be exactly replicated within the framework of neural networks. In order to parameterize the Q-matrix...

Publication date: 2018

The behavior of a differentially private system is governed by a parameter epsilon which sets a balance between protecting the privacy of individuals and returning accurate results. While a system owner may use a number of heuristics to select epsilon, existing techniques may be unresponsive to the needs of the users who's data is at risk. A promising alternative is to allow users to express...

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