Publications
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Privacy policies are critical to understanding one's rights on online platforms, yet few users read them. In this pictorial, we approach this as a systemic issue that is part a failure of interaction design. We provided a variety of people with printed packets of privacy policies, aiming to tease out this form's capabilities and limitations as a design interface, to understand people's perception…
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This article reconsiders the concept of digital inequality drawing from recent developments in science and technology studies, including evolving theories of materiality (Barad, 2003; Bennett, 2010; Ingold, 2012), work on critical media infrastructures (Parks and Starosielski, 2015), and on maintenance and repair (Jackson, 2014; Edgerton, 2007). New ways of thinking about the material world move…
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This special theme contextualizes, examines, and ultimately works to dispel the feelings of “sublime”—of awe and terror that overrides rational thought—that much of the contemporary public discourse on algorithms encourages. Employing critical, reflexive, and ethnographic techniques, these authors show that while algorithms can take on a multiplicity of different cultural meanings, they…
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Maintaining the privacy of one’s personal information—one’s choice of when to disclose it and to whom, how one maintains control over it, and the risks of disclosure—is one of the most important social issues of the internet era. For the past decade, privacy researchers have focused on several domains, including: documenting public opinion about privacy attitudes and expectations; understanding…
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The creators of technical infrastructure are under social and legal pressure to comply with expectations that can be difficult to translate into computational and business logics. This dissertation bridges this gap through three projects that focus on privacy engineering, information security, and data economics, respectively. These projects culminate in a new formal…
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The passage of China’s national cybersecurity law in June 2017 has been interpreted as an unprecedented impediment to the operation of foreign firms in the country, with its new requirements for data localization, network operators’ cooperation with law enforcement officials, and online content restrictions, among others. Although the law’s scope is indeed broader than that of any previous…
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A system, method and non-transitory computer readable medium for detecting unsecured sensors in a network. A computing system can find an IP address associated with an unsecured sensor based on a port through which the unsecured sensor communicates with the network. The computing system can ascertain a prefix route associated with the IP address for the unsecured sensor based on a portion of the…
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Of the many problems faced by the field of information security, two are particularly pressing: cooperation and learning. To effectively respond to threats and vulnerabilities, information security practitioners must cooperate to securely share sensitive information and coordinate responses across organizational and territorial boundaries. Yet there are insufficient numbers of personnel who have…
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This essay explores the changing significance of gender in fiction, asking especially whether its prominence in characterization has varied from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. We have reached two conclusions, which may seem in tension with each other. The first is that gender divisions between characters have become less sharply marked over the last 170…
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Although "privacy by design" (PBD) — embedding privacy protections into products during design, rather than retroactively —uses the term "design" to recognize how technical design choices implement and settle policy, design approaches and methodologies are largely absent from PBD conversations. Critical, speculative, and value-centered design approaches can be used to elicit reflections on…
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Blockchain is viewed by many as big as, or even bigger than, the development of the Internet. Blockchain technology and its applications have been evolving rapidly. A number of factors have contributed to both the advancement of this technology and the quick build-out and iteration of applications in financial services and other industries. This chapter will provide a survey of key activities in…
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As the modal sources of data in education have shifted over the past few decades, so too have the modeling paradigms applied to these data. In this paper, we overview the principle foci of modeling in the areas of standardized testing, computer tutoring, and online courses from whence these big data have come, and provide a rationale for their adoption in each context. As these data become more…
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We present a set of design fiction proposals related to sensing and tracking technologies, inspired by the 2013 science fiction novel The Circle. By creating design proposals that explore connections between the novel's imagined world and our present and future realities, we show that we are able to explore, expand, and articulate a range of social, technical, and legal configurations of the…
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The role of emotion in social media has been the subject of considerable research and media attention. But while stereotypes about the emotional profile of status updates — that they are overly-positive, or overly-angry — have solidified, evidence remains circumstantial and indirect. Further, although researchers have made numerous efforts to use the emotions we express in status updates to make…
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How do companies creating new technologies featuring new forms of personal data respond to the radical uncertainty of designing data ecosystems and accompanying business models with that sensitive data?
This dissertation answers this question with an empirical, inductive, multiple case comparison of the development of pioneering fitness technologies by Suunto, Garmin, and Adidas. Cases draw on…
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Cognitive task analysis is a laborious process made more onerous in educational platforms where many problems are user created and mostly left without identified knowledge components. Past approaches to this issue of untagged problems have centered around text mining to impute knowledge components (KC). In this work, we advance KC imputation research by modeling both the content (text) of a…
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In this paper, we demonstrate a first-of-its-kind adaptive intervention in a MOOC utilizing real-time clickstream data and a novel machine learned model of behavior. We detail how we augmented the edX platform with the capabilities necessary to support this type of intervention which required both tracking learners’ behaviors in real-time and dynamically adapting content based on each learner’s…
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“Should be read by anyone interested in understanding the future,” The Times Literary Supplement raved about the original edition of The Social Life of Information. We’re now living in that future, and one of the seminal books of the Internet Age is more relevant than ever.
The future was a place where technology was supposed to empower individuals and obliterate social organizations. Pundits…
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We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal account of the ways in which information and society are related and of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. Using information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense,…