Talks & Events

Upcoming Events

Brown Bag Lunch with Sam Woolley

Date: September 20, 2019

Time: 12 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Location: Lady Bird Johnson Room, CMA 5.136

Brown Bag Lunch with Sam Woolley

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…)

Past Events

Critical Infrastructure Studies: A Primer

Date: September 4, 2019

Time: 4 - 6 p.m.

Location: Patton Hall (RLP), 1.302D 305 23RD ST E, Austin, Texas 78712

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Critical Infrastructure Studies: A Primer

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.

TIPI Brown Bag Lunch Featuring RTF & Journalism Doctoral Student Presentations

Date: June 3, 2019

Time: 11:30 a.m.

Location: CMB 3.112

TIPI Brown Bag Lunch Featuring RTF & Journalism Doctoral Student Presentations
  • 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

Nordic Media Welfare State. The Case of Finland: Variant or Deviant?

Date: May 3, 2019

Time: 3:30 p.m.

More about Marko Ala Fossi

Nordic Media Welfare State. The Case of Finland: Variant or Deviant?
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

Injustices of Digital Disruption: More Tepid Policy or a Radical Democratic Turn?

Date: April 4, 2019

Time: 3:30 p.m.

Location: BMC 5.208

Injustices of Digital Disruption: More Tepid Policy or a Radical Democratic Turn?

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.

Regulation and Responsibility: The Dynamic Global Landscape for Privacy, Data Protection, and Technology

Date: March 11, 2019

Time: 11 a.m.

Location: Engineering Education and Research Center Mulva Auditorium

Regulation and Responsibility: The Dynamic Global Landscape for Privacy, Data Protection, and Technology

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.

Upcoming Moody College Events