107th Birthday Celebration

Presentations

Evolution or Devolution? Three Decades of Public Policy for the Library & Information Sector 

Alan S. Inouye 

Much has changed in public policy for the library and information sector since I entered this world in 1997. This talk will describe these changes and their underlying technological, political, and social trends and forces. The resulting evolution of public policy will be presented, leading to the present day. The profound policy challenges and strategies and tactics to address them will be discussed. Possible directions for the future of this public policy will be discussed, ultimately addressing the question of evolution or devolution?

Trust and Truth in the Age of Generative AI

Hany Farid

Generative AI — so-called deepfakes — have captured the imagination of some and struck fear in others. Although they vary in their form and creation, deepfakes refer to text, image, audio, or video that has been automatically synthesized by a machine-learning system. Deepfakes are the latest in a long line of techniques used to manipulate reality, yet their introduction poses new opportunities and risks due to the democratized access to what would have historically been the purview of Hollywood-style studios. I will discuss the decades long trajectory of technologies used to distort reality, how these latest AI powered technologies work, how deepfakes are being used and misused, and if (and how) they can be distinguished from reality.

Beyond Big Tech: Advocacy Technologists within Mission-Driven Civil Society Organizations

Lauren Chambers

A new class of technology professionals is shaping policy, informing legal arguments, and bolstering advocacy efforts from inside nonprofit and civil society organizations. This career path might be claimed by a number of different new sociotechnical domains: public interest technology (PIT), civic technology, data for good, technology for social justice, and others. Yet it is still unclear exactly what professional roles are emerging, what sorts of people are filling them, and what such individuals' work looks like and achieves. This work presents an interview study that seeks to characterize a specific sub-population of technological practitioners who are contributing materially to mission-driven projects from within the civil society or nonprofit sector: advocacy technologists. I present four patterns of praxis (i.e., professional practices and paradigms) common to advocacy technologists: their disposition as critics who interrogate technological paradigms and  who introspect on their own ethical footprint, and their professional position translating between technical and non-technical worlds and trailblazing into new career paths. These four patterns demonstrate that advocacy technologists are choosing to occupy a precarious new niche within advocacy work ecosystems that has great potential to impact policy and design outcomes. Ultimately, this work proposes that mission-driven civil society organizations and their technologists are not only underexplored sites for sociotechnical research, but also potentially rich collaborators for researchers who seek to deepen their impact on policy and social change.

Speakers

Alan S. Inouye 

Alan S. Inouye is a writer and adviser on public policy. With over 28 years in national public policy in Washington, D.C., Alan has served as senior director for the American Library Association, coordinator of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and a study director at the National Academy of Sciences. Earlier in his career, he worked in Silicon Valley as a computer programmer, statistician, and manager of information systems. In 1997, Alan earned his Ph.D. from the School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley. 

Hany Farid

Hany Farid is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with a joint appointment in electrical engineering & computer sciences and the School of Information. He is also a member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Lab, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Center for Innovation in Vision and Optics, Development Engineering, Vision Science Program, and is a senior faculty advisor for the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. His research focuses on digital forensics, forensic science, misinformation, image analysis, and human perception.

He received his undergraduate degree in computer science and applied mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1989, his M.S. in computer science from SUNY Albany, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Following a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, he joined the faculty at Dartmouth College in 1999 where he remained until 2019.

He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Lauren Chambers

Lauren Chambers is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information, where she studies the intersection of data, technology, and sociopolitical advocacy with Prof. Deirdre Mulligan. Previously Lauren was the staff technologist at the ACLU of Massachusetts, where she explored government data in order to inform citizens and lawmakers about the effects of legislation and government on our civil liberties. Her current research explores the roles of 'public interest technologists' within civil society.