Talks & Events
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Past Events
This event has been postponed until Fall 2020.
There is so much buzz about artificial intelligence, but what’s real and what’s fiction?
In this hands-on session about AI’s effects on science and society, Harvard researcher and artist Sarah Newman will help us explore scholarly and practical AI questions big and small, and lead participants through activities to help us visualize our ideas for answering those questions. She’ll help us think more creatively about these issues by guiding us through design exercises using unexpected materials. This will also be an opportunity for attendees to think through ongoing research ideas and explore the implications, positive and negative, of AI technologies.
As part of our Good Systems work, Talia Stroud, Director of the Center for Media Engagement, Mary Neuburger, Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, and Sharon Strover proposed to host monthly “Disinformation Network” meetings to convene the diverse group of people on campus working on disinformation-related research. The purpose of these meetings is to share what we are working on, to explore findings and to broaden opportunities to use our work. We would be delighted if you could join us.
Meetings will convene January 29th, February 19th, March 11th, and April 15th. Speakers include Talia Stroud, Amelia Acker, and Tricia Moravec. These meetings are informal and will include light refreshments. – We are equipped for videoconferencing.
Good Systems is hosting a fireside chat with Tim Hwang, director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, and Professor Sharon Strover from the Moody College of Communication. Dubbed “The Busiest Man on the Internet” by Forbes, Hwang researches and writes about the social implications of artificial intelligence. Before joining the Harvard-MIT initiative, he served as Google’s global public policy lead on AI. His current work focuses on the geopolitical aspects of computational power and ensuring social justice in machine learning applications.
Following the fireside chat, we invite everyone to attend a reception to meet the Good Systems research team and learn about projects that will be launching this year. UT faculty and staff will also have the opportunity to network with colleagues from around campus and find out what opportunities exist for participating in this grand challenge.
This is a free event, but space is limited, so please reserve your spot today.
Join the Technology & Information Policy Institute as we host Samuel C. Woolley, Assistant Professor in the Journalism School at the Moody College of Communication. Professor Woolley will present his talk, Addressing the Next Wave of Computational Propaganda.
If you would like an invitation to attend, email trish.morrison@austin.utexas.edu.
Lunch provided with RSVP.
Samuel C. Woolley is an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He has affiliations as a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as a visiting scholar at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at the University of California at Berkeley, and as a research affiliate at the Project for Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University.
Woolley’s research is focused on how emergent technologies are used in and around global political communication. His work on computational propaganda—the use of social media in attempts to manipulate public opinion—has revealed the ways in which a wide variety of political groups in the United States and abroad have leveraged tools such as bots and trending algorithms and tactics of disinformation and trolling in efforts to control information flows online. His projects on digital politics, automation/AI, social media, and political polarization have been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the New Venture Fund for Communications, and others. (more…)
Abstract: What have been the main approaches to the study of infrastructure that now combine to make the topic of such compelling socio-political, technological, media-informatic, cultural, historical, and artistic interest across the disciplines? In this talk, Alan Liu provides an introduction to “critical infrastructure studies,” focusing on why multi-disciplinary perspectives—sometimes tensely divergent in their premises even when converging to make, for example, a “bridge” or a “barrier”—are needed to imagine good infrastructure as the foundation for “good systems.” In the case of the University of Texas “Bridging Barriers” Grand Challenges initiative, for example, how many different ways are there to understand what a bridge or a barrier is good for (and for whom)?
Bio: Alan Liu is a Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has worked in the areas of digital humanities, humanities advocacy, Romantic literature, and literary and cultural theory. His most recent book is Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (U. Chicago Press, 2018) He is the principal investigator of the “WhatEvery1Says” digital humanities project, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative using machine learning to study public discourse about the humanities at big-data scales.
- Richelle Crotty & Alexis Schrubbe: A Band-Aid on the Digital Divide: Investigating Mobile Beacon and Library Mobile Hotspot Lending Programs as an Alternative for Internet Access
- Martin Riedl: Weaponizing Internet Governance: Comparing the German Network Enforcement Act and FOSTA-SESTA in the United States
- Hogeun Seo: Platform Rules: Samsung’s Platform Businesses in Global Smartphone Industry
TIPI Guest Lecture with Marko Ala-Fossi
University Lecturer, Adjunct Professor
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences (ITC)
The Communication Sciences Unit
Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
This lecture examines a fundamentally important question for the future of society. Is there ever likely to be an effective challenge to the pursuit of wealth through inequitable mass individualization? The ‘platformization of everything’ – by Google, Baidu, Facebook, Amazon, and a few others – is implicated in the spread of misinformation and in the deepening of many kinds of inequalities.
Robin explores reasons for the persistence of cautious and relatively weak policy responses to platform power and whether a turn to radical democratic theory and practice might help to promote policy responses that work as a counterpoint to platform dominance.
Presented by the Technology and Information Policy Institute and the Digital Media Speaker Series as part of the Media Studies Colloquium.
Good Systems is hosting a fireside chat with Julie Brill, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, and Professor Sharon Strover from the Moody College of Communication.
Brill is a former FTC commissioner and is widely regarded as a data privacy and protection expert. As an FTC Commissioner, she worked intensively on the wave of new privacy issues accompanying technology changes including the Internet of Things (IoT) and the data brokering industry, and she also anticipated many of the current problems with algorithm-driven systems. Brill has called for more citizen-consumer choice in how personal data are used and stored and will be sharing some of her thoughts and knowledge with us on March 11 on the UT campus.