Ph.D. Research Reception, Part 2
Join us as Ph.D. students from the School of Information share their innovative research.
The Ph.D. program at the School of Information draws doctoral students from a wide array of disciplines whose interests and approaches are as varied as their backgrounds. Though they all take technology as their object of study, our Ph.D. students approach the topic from many different angles — economic, political, social, legal, ethical — in an effort to understand the present impact and future development of information technology.
Ph.D. research presentations are continued from Wednesday, March 10.
Schedule
12:00 pm | Welcome |
12:05 pm | Misled by Metaphor: Unpacking the Mosaic Theory and Getting Back to Fourth Amendment Fundamentals Nitin Kohli |
12:25 pm | Searching for Representation: A Sociotechnical Audit of Googling for Members of U.S. Congress Emma Lurie |
12:45 pm | Break |
12:55 pm | Sensor-Mediated Empathy: A Mixed Methods Investigation of Social Biosensing Max Curran |
1:55 pm | Break |
2:00 pm | Reception |
Presentations
Misled by Metaphor: Unpacking the Mosaic Theory and Getting Back to Fourth Amendment Fundamentals
Nitin Kohli
The Maynard / Jones and Carpenter decisions rocked the privacy landscape. Scholars have claimed that it “takes the Fourth Amendment in a new direction.” Some have claimed it establishes a new kind of privacy, one that resembles a “quantitative notion of privacy.” Others claim that it radically re-architects the way courts evaluate searches. As such, scholars and commentators have viewed these decisions as a radical departure from 4th Amendment law. But there is nothing in these decisions that makes this so.
In this talk, we identify two clear through lines between prior precedent and the Maynard / Jones and Carpenter decisions. Unlike the proxies identified by others, we offer principles that consistently guide the Court's reasoning. We close with a set of questions that courts can ask to ease the application of these principles in practice. In doing so, we provide workable and predictable tests to guide law enforcement and the courts as they grapple with the meaning of the Maynard / Jones and Carpenter decisions.
Searching for Representation: A Sociotechnical Audit of Googling for Members of U.S. Congress
Emma Lurie
High-quality online civic infrastructure is increasingly critical for the success of democratic processes. There is a pervasive reliance on search engines to find facts and information necessary for political participation and oversight. We find that approximately 10% of the top Google search results are likely to mislead California information seekers who use search to identify their congressional representatives. We use both qualitative and quantitative methods to understand what aspects of the information ecosystem lead to this sociotechnical breakdown. Factors identified include Google's heavy reliance on Wikipedia, the lack of authoritative, machine parsable, high accuracy data about the identity of elected officials based on geographic location, and the search engine's treatment of under-specified queries.
Sensor-Mediated Empathy: A Mixed Methods Investigation of Social Biosensing
Max Curran
This dissertation talk investigates social biosensing, the sharing of physiological information between people, through the lenses of empathy and related interpersonal psychological processes. Research prototypes and already in-the-wild devices and applications designed for social biosensing are indicative of the shift in attention beyond individual self-tracking into the social realm. Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative research methodology, this talk covers studies which build on one another to fill in gaps present in our current understanding of the underlying effects of social biosensing. This work seeks to provide answers to questions including: What is the measurable effect of social biosensing on one's accuracy in predicting another's internal states, what impact does social biosensing have on measures of closeness and humanization compared to other information types, and how do people form meanings of unfamiliar biosensory information in a social world. This includes the first ever experimental studies quantitatively assessing valence and arousal empathic accuracy with social biosensing as well as an implementation of intersubjectivity in analysis of physically separated friends' meaning-making about social biosensory information.