Publications
Exoplanet detection is an extremely active research topic in astronomy. Researchers in the past have attempted to detect exoplanets using conventional methods like Radial Velocity, Transit Method, Gravitational Microlensing, Direct Imaging, Polarimetry, Astrometry, etc. While the approaches undertaken for all these studies vary, many of the research works conducted are based on the change in...
Thanks to modern technological advances, we now enjoy seemingly unlimited access to information. Yet how did information become so central to our everyday lives, and how did its processing and storage make our data-driven era possible? This volume is the first to consider these questions in comprehensive detail, tracing the global emergence of information practices, technologies, and more,...
Technological advancement has contributed immensely to human life and society. Technologies like industrial robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are advancing at a rapid pace. While the evolution of Artificial Intelligence has contributed significantly to the development of personal assistants, automated drones, smart home devices, etc., it has also raised questions about the...
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most powerful platforms that incorporates several other technological components within itself. The IoT ecosystem comprises devices, communications, protocols, analytics, cloud, automation, etc. Its magnitude keeps on increasing with the addition of tools and services. While IoT has many advantages like connectivity, efficiency, and convenience, it is a...
The functionality of the Internet and the Web are determined in large part by the design of technical standards that allow for interoperable implementations. Those design decisions are important both in terms of functionality and in maintaining basic public policy values including accessibility, freedom of expression, privacy and security. This is one instance of a phenomenon variously...
In 1950 Robert L. Gitler went to Japan to found the first college-level school of library science in that country. His mission, an improbable success, was documented in an assisted autobiography as Robert Gitler and the Japan Library School (Scarecrow Press, 1999). Subsequent research into initiatives to improve library services during the Allied occupation has revealed surprising...
This dissertation investigates social biosensing: the sharing of physiological information between people, particularly through the lens of empathy and related interpersonal psychological processes. Self-tracking is the the collection and sharing of physiological information about oneself and has been a focus in academic research, but a next step in the use of this data, particularly...
The standard response to concerns about “black box” algorithms is to make those algorithms transparent or explainable. Explainability is an additional design goal for machine-learning systems. Driven in part by growing recognition of the limits of transparency to foster human understanding of algorithmic systems, and in part by pursuit of other goals such as safety and human compatibility,...
Enhancing machine capabilities to answer questions has been a topic of considerable focus in recent years of NLP research. Language models like Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo)[1] and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) [2] have been very successful in developing general purpose language models that can be optimized for a large number of downstream language...
The need for electronic health records to be transferred between institutions is large and growing. Ensuring smooth and accurate identification of patients is a privacy problem endemic to data storage in all fields. The field of data science must design and implement best practices in data stewardship, to ensure that security breaches do not under mine data privacy.
Recognizing the prevalence of initiatives to align technology with social values through design and “by design” (such as privacy by design, security by design, and governance by design), this dissertation explores the current and potential role of design techniques in attending to values, and analyzes user experience (UX) professionals’ “values work” practices—practices used to surface,...
Intelligence has been defined in many ways like logic, awareness, reasoning, critical thinking, etc. Many researchers insist on the possibility of a Technological Singularity shortly, which may see machines gaining intelligence similar to, or greater than humans. While many researchers believe that Technological Singularity is at an arm’s length, many counter-question the possibility of the...
How many steps did you take today? Counting steps may seem like a clear-cut number, but this number is embroiled in bigger goals around health, broadly conceived, how we feel about our bodies, behavior, and lifestyle. We engage these issues on a personal level while also influenced by social relationships and societal narratives. Technologies such as step-counters influence what “counts”, or...
Migrants play a central role in the economy and society of most developing countries and are primary drivers of economic mobility among poor and rural households. The decision to migrate is one of the most important economic decisions an individual can make. On the one hand, social networks play a crucial role in influencing people's migration decision. On the other hand, as migrants adapt to...
This paper introduces "infrastructural speculations," an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds...
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