Publications

Publication date: 2017

“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...

Publication date: 2017

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...

Publication date: 2017

The development and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly emerging as the next major step in the ongoing evolution of the digital society and economy. To gain better insight and foresight into key characteristics that will differentiate this more intensely connected future from the present, we shift the focus of attention in this paper from the Internet of ‘things’ per se, to the...

Publication date: 2017

Poverty is one of the most important determinants of adverse health outcomes globally, a major cause of societal instability and one of the largest causes of lost human potential. Traditional approaches to measuring and targeting poverty rely heavily on census data, which in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are unavailable or out-of-date. Alternate measures are needed to...

Publication date: 2017

We present a microsociology of Minecraft play based on ethnographic observations of a 40-hour co-located Minecraft camp for 28 low-income and minority children in July 2015, supplemented by usage statistics and follow-up interviews. We consider the equity challenges presented by (1) Minecraft itself and the ecosystem supporting it; (2) the multiplayer server we used, which was founded on...

Publication date: 2017

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) generate a granular record of the actions learners choose to take as they interact with learning materials and complete exercises towards comprehension. With this high volume of sequential data and choice comes the potential to model student behaviour. There exist several methods for looking at longitudinal, sequential data like those recorded from learning...

Publication date: 2016

In the 1950’s a group of artists led by experimental composer John Cage actively engaged chance as a means to limit their control over the artworks they produced. These artists described a world filled with active and lively forces, from the sounds of rain to blemishes in paper, that could be harnessed in creative production to give rise to new aesthetics and cultivate new sensitivities to the...

Publication date: 2016

Background: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a complex global problem, not only because it is a human rights issue, but also because it is associated with chronic mental and physical illnesses as well as acute health outcomes related to injuries for women and their children. Attitudes, beliefs, and norms regarding IPV are significantly associated with the likelihood of both...

Publication date: 2016

Regulators and privacy advocates increasingly demand that privacy be protected through the technical design of products and services, as well as through organizational procedures and policies. Privacy research by computer scientists and engineers are producing insights and techniques that empower a new professional in the technology sector—the privacy engineer. Despite great enthusiasm for...

Publication date: 2016

This article examines one of the largest interventions in computer-based learning currently underway, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, with 2.5 million laptops in use worldwide. Drawing on 2010 and 2013 fieldwork investigating a project in Paraguay with 10,000 of OLPC's “XO” laptops, I explore the ways in which participants interpreted leisure laptop use as “learning.” I show that the...

Publication date: 2016

The meaning of privacy has been much disputed throughout its history in response to wave after wave of new technological capabilities and social configurations. The current round of disputes over privacy fuelled by data science has been a cause of despair for many commentators and a death knell for privacy itself for others. We argue that privacy’s disputes are neither an accidental feature of...

Publication date: 2016

Computational social science is an emerging field at the intersection of statistics, computer science, and the social sciences. This paper addresses the philosophical foundations of this new field. Kant and Peirce provide an understanding of scientific objectivity as intersubjective validity. Modern mathematics, and especially the mathematics of algorithms and statistics, get their objectivity...

Publication date: 2016

This article examines one of the largest interventions in computer-based learning currently underway, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, with 2.5 million laptops in use worldwide. Drawing on 2010 and 2013 fieldwork investigating a project in Paraguay with 10,000 of OLPC's “XO” laptops, I explore the ways in which participants interpreted leisure laptop use as “learning.” I show that the...

Publication date: 2016

The migration of robots from the laboratory into sensitive home settings as commercially available therapeutic agents represents a significant transition for information privacy and ethical imperatives. We present new privacy paradigms and apply the fair information practices (FIPs) to investigate concerns unique to the placement of therapeutic robots in private home contexts. We then explore...

Publication date: 2016

This paper explores corporate concept videos as a type of design fiction that embed a vision about the future of computing – including how computing should be done, for whom, and the norms that might exist – and allow for a discourse to explore and contest these claims. We introduce a method for critiquing and analyzing concept videos. Through an analysis of Google Glass’ and Microsoft...

Publication date: 2016

Policy proposals often feature information sharing as a means to improve cybersecurity, but lack specificity connecting these activities to specific goals intended to advance the state of cybersecurity. We use the Doctrine of Cybersecurity as a lens to examine existing information sharing efforts and evaluate the utility of information sharing proposals. Leaning on the analogous public good-...

Publication date: 2016

Achieving any specific level of cybersecurity inevitably entails making compromises with regard to cost, function, and convenience, as well as trade‑offs
between societal values, such as openness, privacy, freedom of expression, and innovation. In defining regulations and incentives, decisions have to be made about how to balance these trade‑offs while optimizing security outcomes. To...

Publication date: 2016

Models of learning in EDM and LAK are pushing the boundaries of what can be measured from large quantities of historical data. When controlled randomization is present in the learning platform, such as randomized ordering of problems within a problem set, natural quasi-randomized controlled studies can be conducted, post-hoc. Difficulty and learning gain attribution are among the factors of...

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