UC Berkeley School of Information: Recent Episodes
School of Information, UC Berkeley
Satish Ramachandran is the global head of design at Nutanix, where he is dedicated to applying design to reimagine enterprise computing. In this role he ensures the products being built serve the users’ intent, with very minimal, simple, and delightful interactions. Additionally, he focuses on scaling the design organization across geos and implementing processes to keep pace with rapid growth.
Prior to Nutanix, Satish held a variety of management and technical leadership roles over the past two decades at computing infrastructure companies such as DataDomain (EMC), Andiamo (Cisco), and Tandem (HP). A deep background in engineering coupled with a longstanding interest in literature, music, cognition, human behavior, and philosophy enables him to bridge the twin worlds of design and engineering effectively. Satish holds an M.S. in computer science. He lives in Silicon Valley with his family.
Judd Antin delivered the keynote address at the UC Berkeley School of Information's January 2017 commencement ceremony. Judd Antin is the director of research at Airbnb. In his research, Judd uses the methods and practices of UX and data science to study mediated interactions and the connections between attitudes and behaviors. His research draws from UX, HCI, social psychology, communication, behavioral economics, anthropology, and sociology. Judd was previously the manager of the Engagement and Core Experiences research group at Facebook. He earned a Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information in 2010.
Fast growing startups can launch your career. But breaking into one can sometimes feel like learning a new language. Join Dhawal Mujumdar, MIMS alum 2011 and founder of AdsNative, as he shares insider tips and first-hand experience on making your career in the startup world.
Learn how to find interesting startups and evaluate their worth, what roles are most sought after from founders at various stages of the company, how to determine what you bring to the table, and finally - how to connect with startups in a meaningful way, framing your experience to present maximum value and produce positive results. . . . . . . . . Dhawal Mujumdar is a founder of AdsNative, a fast growing startup based out of San Francisco that builds leading monetization software for apps and websites. AdsNative has raised $11 Million in venture financing from leading institutional investors and have offices in San Francisco, New York City, and Bangalore, India. Dhawal has bachelors degree in Computer Science and attended UC Berkeley for his master's degree from School of Information. Dhawal also worked as a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley.
Tech entrepreneurs and policy wonks share a common desire to understand and shape the world, but often have different views, tools, and models for impact. Hear an inside perspective from two former members of President Obama’s White House team about how tech policy and presidential priorities intersect, and how technology will increasingly drive the decision-making process and implementation in the years to come.
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Nicole Wong Former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer
Nicole Wong is the former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer focusing on internet, privacy, and innovation policy. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Nicole served as the legal director for products at Twitter. From 2004 to 2011, she was Google’s vice president and deputy general counsel, primarily responsible for the company’s product and regulatory matters. Before joining Google, Nicole was a partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie and advised some of Silicon Valley’s early and notable tech companies, including Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Netscape. She also has taught media and internet law and policy courses as an adjunct professor and lecturer at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and University of San Francisco.
Nicole is a frequent speaker and author on issues related to law and technology, including five appearances before the US Congress regarding internet policy. She is a founding columnist for the Christian Science Monitor’s Passcode, a section covering online security and privacy in the digital age. She serves as an advisor to the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, and several technology companies on privacy, regulatory strategy and international development. Nicole chairs the board of Friends of Global Voices, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting citizen and online media projects globally, and sits on the board of WITNESS, an organization promoting the use of video to advance human rights. Nicole received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown University, and a law degree and a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.
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Greg Nelson Former Chief of Staff, Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Advisor, National Economic Council, The White House
Greg Nelson left the White House this summer after six and a half years as a senior leader in the economic policy, technology, and strategic partnerships teams. During his tenure, his policy portfolio included international trade, economic policy, and US participation in the G7 and G20, infrastructure, technology policy, energy, entrepreneurship, and startups. For two years, Greg was the chief of staff at the National Economic Council for director Gene Sperling, where he coordinated economic policy development, managed strategy and communications, and worked across the White House and cabinet to develop and implement the president’s economic policy priorities. Previously, Greg was deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement focused on public-private partnerships and setting up the White House’s private sector engagement infrastructure, including as deputy director of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Prior to the White House, Greg built and sold a technology company, developed startups in energy and biomaterials, and consulted for businesses, nonprofits, and foundations. He holds a BA in political science and history from Yale University.
Twenty years after the World Wide Web was created, can we now make it better? How can we ensure that our most important values — privacy, free speech, and open access to knowledge — are enshrined in the code itself? In a provocative call to action, entrepreneur and Open Internet advocate Brewster Kahle challenges us to build a better, decentralized Web based on new distributed technologies. He lays out a path to creating a new Web that is reliable, private, but still fun — in order to lock the Web open for good.
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A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing universal access to all knowledge. He is the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the Internet’s first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 25 petabytes of data — the books, Web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage, working with more than 450 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all.
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About the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996 with the mission to provide “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” The organization seeks to preserve the world’s cultural heritage and to provide open access to our shared knowledge in the digital era, supporting the work of historians, scholars, journalists, students, the blind and reading disabled, as well as the general public. The Internet Archive’s digital collections include more than 25 petabytes of data: 460 billion Web captures, moving images (2.2 million films and videos), audio (2.5 million recordings, 140,000 live concerts), texts (8 million texts including 3 million digital books), software (100,000 items) and television (3 million hours). Each day, 2-3 million visitors use or contribute to the archive, making it one of the world’s top 250 sites. It has created new models for digital conservation by forging alliances with more than 450 libraries, universities and national archives around the world. The Internet Archive champions the public benefit of online access to our cultural heritage and the import of adopting open standards for its preservation, discovery and presentation.
Will Facebook play a decisive role in the 2016 presidential primaries? Should Twitter be blamed for the rise of the Islamic State? Has the Chinese government successfully marginalized political dissent by controlling the companies that run China’s Internet? The fast-evolving power relationships — and clashes — among governments, corporations, and other non-state actors across digital networks pose fundamental challenges to how we think about governance, accountability, security, and human rights. Without new approaches to governance and accountability by public as well as private actors, the Internet of the future will no longer be compatible with the defense and protection of human rights. Nor will its users — or governments — be any more secure.
Fortunately a nascent ecosystem of efforts are now experimenting with new ways to hold governments, companies, and other actors accountable when they exercise power across global networks. One such effort is the Ranking Digital Rights project, which sets forth a framework for measuring information and communication technology (ICT) companies’ commitments, policies, and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy.
In this lecture, Ranking Digital Rights director Rebecca MacKinnon discusses the project’s Corporate Accountability Index as a concrete example how stakeholders around the globe are working to create new frameworks, mechanisms, and processes for holding power accountable and promoting the protection of human rights in a digitally networked world.
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Rebecca MacKinnon is a leading advocate for Internet users’ rights to online freedom of expression and privacy around the world. She is author of the award-winning book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012). Presently based at New America in Washington, D.C., she directs the Ranking Digital Rights project whose Corporate Accountability Index ranks the world’s most powerful Internet and telecommunications companies on policies and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy.
MacKinnon is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, a borderless community of more than 800 writers, digital media experts, activists, and translators living around the world who give voice to the stories of marginalized and misrepresented communities and who advocate for the free expression rights of Internet users everywhere. She also serves on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists and is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder organization focused on upholding principles of freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector.
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Beijing bureau chief from 1998 to 2001 and Tokyo bureau chief from 2001 to 2003. Since leaving CNN in 2004 she has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Open Society Foundations, and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. For two years in 2007–08 she served on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, and taught as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Fall 2013. She is also a visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communications Studies. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. She presently lives in Washington, D.C.
Use of new data technologies now pervades our institutions, both private and government. But this data-driven revolution is far from complete. We can still influence where it takes us. I will discuss some of the current challenges we face, both technical and social, and how we might address them.
Doug Cutting (@cutting) is the founder of numerous successful open-source projects, including Lucene, Nutch, Avro, and Hadoop. Doug joined Cloudera in 2009 from Yahoo!, where he was a key member of the team that built and deployed a production Hadoop storage and analysis cluster for mission-critical business analytics. Doug holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and sits on the board of the Apache Software Foundation.
Privacy is a critical challenge for mobile application development. Mobile applications are easy to build and distribute, and can collect diverse personal data. US policy approaches to data protection in the mobile ecosystem rely on privacy by design: approaches that encourage developers to proactively implement best-practice privacy features to protect sensitive data. But we don’t know what factors motivate developers to implement privacy features when faced with disincentives such as longer development timelines, markets for personal data, and tensions between data protection and data-enabled services. This project begins to identify these factors by investigating how mobile developers talk about and deal with privacy challenges. Interviews with developers and analysis of posts on developer forums reveal that developers are actively grappling with privacy issues. This talk will describe how developers define and legitimate privacy, and describe how knowledge of how to approach privacy problems is disseminated. Understanding the development of privacy as a professional practice can help us shape better guidelines for privacy by design, and broach challenges to the widespread adoption of privacy by design principles.
Katie Shilton is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research explores ethics and policy for the design of information collections, systems and technologies. Current research projects include an investigation of ethics in mobile application development; a project focused on the values and policy implications of Named Data Networking, a new approach to Internet architecture; surveys of consumer privacy expectations in the mobile data ecosystem; and investigating researchers’ ethical beliefs and practices when using online open data sets. Her work has been supported by a Google Faculty Award and several awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award. Katie received a B.A. from Oberlin College, a Master of Library and Information Science from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in information studies from UCLA.
Dale Dougherty is the founder and executive chairman of Maker Media, Inc. which launched Make: magazine in 2005, and Maker Faire, which held its first event in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. Dale’s vision and mission continue to be the guiding force for the family of brands. “The maker movement is contributing to a thriving market ecosystem, serving the needs of makers as they seek out product support, startup advice, and funding avenues. Make: plays an important role as a collaborator and resource for makers as they transition from hobbyists to professionals.”
As executive chairman, Dale is involved in editorial and content strategy and both business and product development. As part of this process, he forges strategic partnerships in support of maker education and global, cultural, and economic initiatives. Make: began at O’Reilly Media, where Dale was a co-founder and the first editor of their computing trade books. When not in the office, Dale can be found making award-winning wines with his family in Sebastopol, CA.
Once upon a time, interacting anonymously online meant talking to strangers who could be anywhere in the world and knew very little about you, and about whom you knew very little. Thanks to GPS, ubiquitous mobile devices and an array of recent apps, however, we can now very easily connect anonymously with friends and strangers who are physically nearby. And as anybody who has read reports of (or experienced) cyberbullying or used apps like Grindr/Tinder/Scruff to meet, um, friends can tell you, local anonymity is very different. In this talk I will be reporting on several recent studies of activity on Facebook and Grindr that explore how location-awareness and interacting with local strangers affects the nature of our interactions and self-presentation. Results suggest that people may feel more free to discuss sensitive topics or explore stigmatized identities when anonymous, but that also being local increases their concerns about being recognized by others.
Bio: Jeremy Birnholtz is an associate professor in the departments of communication studies and electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University. He recently served as a visiting professor on the core data science team at Facebook. His research aims to improve the usefulness and usability of communication and collaboration tools, via a focus on understanding and exploiting mechanisms of human attention and identity management. Jeremy's work has been published in the ACM CHI, CSCW and Group Proceedings, as well as in Organization Science, HCI, JASIST, JCMC, and Computers in Human Behavior. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Google, Facebook and the US Department of Agriculture.
The extent to which we are subject to surveillance — the collection of information about us, by government, commercial, or individual agents — is in large part an economic question. Surveillance takes effort and resources — spend more and we can do better surveillance. Protecting against surveillance also takes effort and resources. Given the state of technology, the amount of effort and money each side expends determines what is surveilled and what is kept private. As technology changes, both the cost and the desirability of surveillance, and protection against surveillance, change. We can confidently predict that information technology and communication costs will continue to decrease, and capabilities to surveil and protect against it will improve.
What are the consequences for our privacy? Will we have a future with more or less privacy? Which do we want?
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Jeffrey MacKie-Mason will be joining UC Berkeley on October 1 as University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer. For the past 29 years, Jeff has been a faculty member at the University of Michigan, where he was the Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science, and also a professor of economics and a professor of public policy. For the last five years he has been the dean of Michigan’s School of Information.
Jeff has been a pioneering scholar of the economics of the Internet and online behavior and a frequent co-author with the Berkeley I School’s first dean, Hal Varian. He has also led the development of the incentive-centered design approach to online information services.
Bob Bell & Stuart Geiger (Ph.D. 2015) look back on their years of doctoral study and what they've learned.
Sharon X. Lin (MIDS 2015) reflects on being the very first class of the School's data science master's program.
Robyn Perry (MIMS 2015) gives her classmates “one last good ideological brainwashing” and challenges them to “combine idealism with entrepreneurialism and find practical ways to make the world a better place — instead of just devising new ways to make people click on ads.”
Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, reflects on the power of information and challenges the I School's 2015 graduates to use that power for good.
In this talk, Hugh Williams shares over ten years of experience in using customer data to improve product experiences and drive business results. He shares stories of both quantitatively and qualitatively understanding customers, and how the large Internet giants experiment, measure, and improve their experiences. He talks about flaws and stories of failed experimentation, and the pitfalls of large scale measurement.
He also discusses his career as an executive at Microsoft, eBay, and Pivotal, and talks about what he plans to do next. A significant part of the talk will be interactive, with plenty of time for questions and discussion.
This talk was a guest lecture for the course Info 296A. Data Science and Analytics: Thought Leaders.
Hugh E. Williams has spent twenty years researching and developing search engines, web services, and big data technologies.
From 2009 to 2013, Hugh was with eBay. He led a large cross-disciplinary team that turned-around the Marketplaces business. His teams conceived, designed, and built eBay’s user experiences, search engine, big data technologies, and platforms.
Prior to eBay, he spent 4+ years managing a search engine R&D team at Microsoft’s Bing, 10+ years researching and developing search technologies, and 5 years running his own startup and consultancy.
He has published over 100 works, mostly in the field of information retrieval, including two books, Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL and Learning Mysql, for O’Reilly Media, Inc. He holds nineteen US patents and has many more pending. He has a Ph.D. from RMIT University in Australia.
“Your data will only be used in aggregated form.” What does this statement mean, and why is it so often included in privacy policies? Drawing from examples in the popular press and the technical literature, the talk will scrutinize the common intuition that privacy is ensured by aggregation and show that information — and hence privacy loss — flows in mysterious ways. Arguing that the situation demands a mathematically rigorous treatment of privacy, the talk will introduce “differential privacy,” a field of research supporting a strong definition of privacy tailored to analysis of large data sets. This still-growing approach is thriving and is beginning to enter practice.
Bio: Cynthia Dwork, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, is renowned for placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation. A cornerstone of this work is differential privacy, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis. Dr. Dwork has also made seminal contributions in cryptography and distributed computing, and is a recipient of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, recognizing some of her earliest work establishing the pillars on which every fault-tolerant system has been built for decades. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
You can buy the best hardware in the world, and hire the best mathematicians. You can write brilliant machine learning algorithms. However: if you do not have a way to produce information that is relevant to your organization and successfully communicate it to them, your entire data science department is the functional equivalent of a paperweight that costs more than raw plutonium.
So let’s take a minute to talk about organizational structure, information flows, hiring, training, and data’s social signal-to-noise-ratio.
Kimberly Stedman Data Scientist Motiga Kimberly Stedman does big data in the games industry. She was originally a field anthropologist, and has lived in five developing countries. Kim has a Master’s in Social and Organizational Systems Analysis.
Kim specializes in the design and management of the social systems that surround data technologies. In other words: Awesome! We’ve got a better algorithm running on faster hardware! … Now what? Kim gave a 5-minute Ignite talk on this topic: How to Build an Effective Data Science Department.
Kim also blogs as K2. She wrote Brosie the Riveter, a comedic article on gender issues in gaming and STEM.
Protecting privacy and civil liberties cannot and should not be left to the lawyers. Given the rapid pace of technological innovation and the glacially slow development of corresponding legal doctrine, it falls to engineers and technologists to consider privacy and civil liberties issues as they design, build, and sell their ideas. In the course of this audience discussion, we will explore a hypothetical situation involving both business and design choices and consider the challenges in charting the most ethical course.
John Grant Civil Liberties Engineer Palantir Technologies John joined Palantir Technologies in September 2010 as the company’s first Civil Liberties Engineer. Previously, John served for nearly a decade as an advisor in the United States Senate. He began his career in the Senate as an aide to Senator Peter Fitzgerald before joining the staff of former presidential candidate and member of the Senate Republican leadership, Senator Lamar Alexander. While working for Senator Alexander on issues ranging from the federal budget to homeland security, John attended law school at Georgetown University. He earned his law degree shortly after joining the staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. As Counsel to Ranking Member Senator Susan Collins, John handled the Committee’s intelligence and privacy and civil liberties portfolios. He conducted oversight of numerous programs within the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. intelligence community as well as investigations into intelligence failures that led to the attacks at Fort Hood and the failed 2009 Christmas Day bombings.
As a Civil Liberties Engineer at Palantir, John has worked with customers all over the world, helping them to develop data protection practices that make the best use of Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties protective capabilities.
Making decisions based on correlation can be risky. At Airbnb, a two-sided marketplace with both an online and offline travel experience, engineers have found that experiments provide powerful insights to act upon, by making it possible to distinguish correlation from causation. However, it’s important to be especially thoughtful about the design and implementation of experiments, given the complexity of the Airbnb system. Elena Grewal, data scientist at Airbnb, will discuss how the Airbnb data science team uses experimentation to inform business and product decisions. Learn how Airbnb uses experiments in non-traditional settings, how experiments enable sound decision making across the company, and how the team has learned the potential pitfalls of experiment analysis along the way.
Elena Grewal Data Science Manager Airbnb Elena Grewal is a data science manager at Airbnb. She leads a team of data scientists responsible for the online experience and offline travel experience. Her team collaborates with the product team, using experimentation and descriptive analysis to design and optimize the site, in addition to validating future product plans and inspiring those plans with exploratory analysis. The team is also responsible for data-driven products, such as pricing suggestions and search ranking algorithms.
Prior to working at Airbnb, Elena completed a doctorate in education at Stanford where she built predictive models of friendships in schools.
The movement known as “open data” started with a handful of governments releasing their data to the public. On one hand, open data has spurred innovative uses of government data, particularly with transit data and apps. But to expand the use and value of open data, we must go beyond mobile apps to leveraging open data as a means to inform public dialogue and decision-making in cities. Learn how San Francisco is migrating from simply pushing data out the door to enabling use of our (that is, your) data.
Joy Bonaguro Chief Data Officer City and County of San Francisco Joy Bonaguro is the first Chief Data Officer for the City and County of San Francisco, where she manages the City’s open data program. Joy has spent more than a decade working at the nexus of public policy, data, and technology. She’s worked from the birth of the open data and open government field, spending seven years designing and managing the development of information systems to support planning and decision-making at the Greater New Orleans Community Data. Prior to joining the City, Joy worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to help develop technology, cyber and privacy policy working closely with both the National Lab CIO Council and the Department of Energy Information Management Advisory Group. Joy earned her Masters from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, where she focused on IT policy.
The data science toolkit encompasses powerful approaches for detecting and clarifying patterns in social or behavioral data. But when it comes to the interpretation of those patterns, it sometimes falls short — the data may convey “what” and “how much” with great precision, but it is often silent on “why” and “how.” Complementary research methods can fill in these gaps and paint a fuller picture of the phenomena at hand. At Facebook, we combine data science with qualitative and quantitative research, often iteratively, to gain a deeper understanding not just of what people are doing on Facebook, but why and how.
Judd Antin UX Research Manager Facebook Judd Antin is a UX Research Manager at Facebook, where he focuses on bring the theories and practices of social psychology, social computing, and HCI to bear to improve Facebook’s products. Judd and his team employ methods that range from ethnographic fieldwork to big data analysis to understand products like News Feed, Ads, Photos, and Groups. In 2011, Judd was named one of MIT Technology Reviews Top Innovators Under 35 (TR35).
Judd holds a Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information, where his research focused on collective action, social dilemmas, and incentive systems in online collaboration. Judd also holds an MA in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland College Park, and a BA in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University.
Andrew T. Fiore Growth Research Team Lead Facebook Andrew T. Fiore leads Facebook’s Growth Research Team, including a program of research to understand and measure the benefits, risks, and barriers to adoption of information and communication technologies in emerging markets. Previously, as a member of the data science team at Facebook, he studied social dynamics in online groups.
His past research at UC Berkeley, the MIT Media Lab, and Microsoft Research focused on the design and analysis of behavior in computer-mediated communication systems, including usenet newsgroups and online dating sites. He holds a Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information, as well as an M.A. in statistics from UC Berkeley, an M.S. in media arts and sciences from MIT, and a B.A. from Cornell University.
A rise in chronic conditions has put a strain on our healthcare system. Treatment for chronic conditions spans time, agencies, and providers. Information systems such as electronic health records should be helping with the challenge of coordination, but too often they do not. My research aims to alleviate this problem by designing health information systems that fit social practices and workflow. In this talk I will describe my research agenda around collaborative reflection – an informal, unpredictable, and adaptive type of decision-making. I have studied collaborative reflection in behavioral and mental health services for children, which are coordinated across clinical, home, and special education settings. Through participatory design I developed Lilypad, a tablet-based information system for collaborative reflection. I then examined the social impact of Lilypad using deployment studies. I will discuss what the Lilypad project tells us about the way health information systems should be designed and integrated within health service organizations, if they are to have a positive impact on stakeholders involved with managing chronic conditions.
Bio:
Gabriela Marcu is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University. She obtained her Ph.D. in human-computer interaction this year from Carnegie Mellon University, and her B.S. in informatics from UC Irvine in 2009. Her interdisciplinary research addresses problems in the coordination of health services. She combines computer science with anthropology and design, to develop and study sociotechnical solutions to real-world problems. She has been named a Siebel Scholar, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Microsoft Research Graduate Women Scholar, and a Google Anita Borg Scholar.
In his doctoral dissertation, Kai Huotari studied how TV live-tweeting influenced the TV viewing experience. He interviewed 45 live-tweeters and analyzed more than 4,000 TV live-tweets sent in the U.S. in 2011–12. The study identified four distinct groups of users live-tweeting about TV programs (fanatic TV live-tweeters, systematic TV live-tweeters, sporadic TV live-tweeters, and active Twitter users), four main categories of TV live-tweets (courtesy tweets, outlet tweets, selection tweets, and analysis tweets), described several TV live-tweeting practices from preparation practices to reading and writing live-tweets and to the use of Twitter functions, and revealed that a TV live-tweeter is an empowered TV viewer who can, by experientializing live-tweeting into his or her TV viewing, personalize and control his or her TV-viewing experience better than before, express him- or herself more fully, and reach a large enough audience and acceptance for his or her ideas.
Jake Peterson discusses the Facebook analytics team and how they perform large scale data analysis, identify actionable insights, suggest recommendations, and influence the direction of the business.
The Facebook analytics team serves as the voice of data that drives success throughout the company, including product development, user engagement, growth, revenue, and operations. Learn about their typical day-to-day responsibilities, challenges, and how best to succeed as a data scientist in analytics.
Jake Peterson is a data scientist and analytics engineering manager at Facebook and has been working in data science for more than ten years — longer than “data science” has been a term. At Facebook, Jake has led data science for four different Facebook product teams, most recently for the Graph Search product. Prior to Facebook, Jake led analytics functions at several tech startups and spent six years in the direct marketing industry as an analytics consultant at Acxiom. He holds a B.S. in computer science and a B.A. in philosophy from Santa Clara University.
What does the recent battle for patent reform mean for startups and for the future of tech policy?
Julie Samuels is executive director and president of the board of Engine, a young and influential advocacy group working to ensure startups have a voice in D.C. Through policy analysis, economic research, and close relationships with policymakers and startups, Engine is helping to elevate the interests of technology entrepreneurship in American policy.
Julie gives an overview of the recent battle in Washington for patent reform and talk about lessons learned. She discusses what the battle means for technology and startup policy going forward — and explains why startups and businesses need to stay involved in the fight for change in D.C.
A panel of women data scientists discuss their career trajectories in the emerging and rapidly evolving field of data science.
Panelists: Katharine Matsumoto, Data Scientist in Product Intelligence, Salesforce.com Vesela Gateva, Sr. Data Scientist, Eventbrite Emi Nomura, Data Scientist, Jawbone Elena Grewal, Data Scientist, Airbnb Pinar Donmez, Chief Data Scientist, Kabbage, Inc Anno Saxenian, Dean, School of Information (moderator)
Meet Eric Liu and Paul Duan of Bayes Impact, a non-profit organization deploying data science teams to work with civic and nonprofit organizations to solve big social impact challenges.
They’ll talk about how Bayes Impact’s full-time fellowship programs bring together domain experts and data scientists from top technology companies and academic institutions and how I School students can get involved.
MIMS student speaker Deb Linton, from the UC Berkeley School of Information 2014 Commencement (May 17, 2014).
From the UC Berkeley School of Information 2014 Commencement (May 17, 2014). Keynote Speaker Nicole Wong is the deputy US chief technology officer, advising on Internet policy and privacy. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Nicole was the legal director at Twitter and vice president and deputy general counsel at Google, primarily responsible for the company’s product and regulatory matters. She is also a former partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie. Nicole is a frequent speaker and author on issues related to law and technology, including multiple appearances before the US Congress regarding Internet policy, censorship and privacy. She has taught media and Internet law and policy courses at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the advisory board to the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and has served on the governing committee of the ABA Communication Law Forum and the board of directors of the First Amendment Coalition. Nicole received her law degree and a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown University.
When Time Magazine named “YOU” as their 2006 Person of the Year, it highlighted what has been deemed the democratization of the media. The term “Web 2.0” was coined to describe this transformation on the internet, where individual volunteers, not institutions, control its content. But many people share doubts about the hype around Web 2.0 and have different ideas about what's significant, what's trivial, and what's irrelevant. Protagonists, such as Andrew Keen, believe that it is not only significant, but is significant enough to threaten “our economy, our culture, and our values.”
Please join UC Berkeley Adjunct Professor Paul Duguid and Andrew Keen in a debate about whether Web 2.0 is truly a threat to our culture. Adjunct Professor Geoffrey Nunberg will moderate the debate.
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Mass Communications at UC Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley Library
Experience designers and researchers are working on their most ambitious challenge yet that represents a new frontier in user interfaces: creating a constellation of systems, machines, and people — including wearable gadgets, tablets, smart phones, and appliances — that can communicate with one another in an autonomous fashion. We are constantly adding new functions to gadgets and new devices to the ecosystem without much thought as to their totality or cumulative complexity. In the coming era of ubiquitous sensors and miniaturized mobile computing, designers need to think about how to weave the digital world into our lives at work so seamlessly that we don’t even notice. Already we’re seeing a groundswell of new technologies that insinuate themselves seamlessly into users’ personal lives like the voice and gesture-controlled Xbox, but this is just the beginning. At GE, we want to apply the same embedded intelligence to the world of big iron and people at work to create disruptive experiences, not just products or interfaces, by connecting people with people and people with machines and data. In this talk you will learn how GE Global Research is pursuing new opportunities in analytics visualization, the future of field engineering, wearables, robotics, semiautonomous vehicles, and agents that can be applied to the industrial Internet.
Bio:
Arnold Lund, Ph.D., CUXP, is the connected experience technology leader and human-systems interaction lab manager at GE Global Research. He was previously the principal user experience lead in Microsoft’s Server and Management Studios and the principal director of user experience in Microsoft’s IT organization. Prior to that, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Ameritech, US West Advanced Technologies, and Sapient. His research has been recognized by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and his work on metrics for assessing user experiences and predicting successful products continues to be influential.
Lund is a fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and served on the HFES Executive Council. He has been elected to the prestigious ACM SIGCHI Academy and recently received the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award. He has long been engaged in human computer interaction (HCI) and human factors standards, and in the area of accessibility and emerging technology. He chaired the HFES Institute and oversaw the HFES-200 standard and its approval as an ANSI standard. He is a certified user experience professional and served as president of the board of directors for the Board of Certification in Professional Ergonomics (BCPE).
Lund has published widely in R&D management and on research in natural user interfaces, and has more than 20 patents. He has taught user-centered design at Northwestern University and the University of Washington.
What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens’ lives? Youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens’ use of social media.
In her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, boyd explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, she argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers’ ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions.
Bio:
Dr. danah boyd is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, a research assistant professor at New York University, a fellow of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an alumna of the UC Berkeley School of Information (Ph.D. ’08).
Dr. boyd is “the reigning expert on how young people use the Internet,” according to Fortune Magazine, which named her the smartest academic in tech. The Washington Post dubbed boyd “the high priestess of social networking.” Her research focuses on how youth integrate technology into their everyday practices and other interactions between technology and society.
This workshop was the last in a series of three events co-hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and academic institutions across the country in response to President Obama’s call for a review of privacy issues in the context of increased digital information and the computing power to process it.
Hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
The closing keynote was delivered by John Podesta. John Podesta is currently counselor to the president. In 2008, he served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition team. Previously, Podesta served as White House chief of staff to President William J. Clinton.
Video of all of the day's sessions are available at http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/2014bigdataworkshop
The dissemination of reproducible computational research — where the code and data that generated the results are made conveniently available — is now widely recognized as a transformative movement within the scientific community. It is attracting attention not only from researchers but also from librarians and repository managers, journal editorial boards, funding agencies and policy makers, and scientific software developers.
This talk motivates the rationale for this shift, and presents solutions I have been developing to facilitate reliable and re-usable computational research including: new empirical findings on changes to journal data and code publication policies; best practices for code and data release; the open source dissemination and access tool ResearchCompendia.org; and the "Reproducible Research Standard" for ensuring the distribution of legally usable data and code. Some of these results are described in the forthcoming co-edited books Implementing Reproducible Research and Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good.
Bio:
Victoria Stodden is assistant professor of statistics at Columbia University and serves as a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI), and on Columbia University’s Senate Information Technologies Committee. She is one of the creators of SparseLab, a collaborative platform for reproducible computational research and has developed an award winning licensing structure to facilitate open and reproducible computational research, called the Reproducible Research Standard. She is currently working on the NSF-funded project “Policy Design for Reproducibility and Data Sharing in Computational Science.”
Victoria co-chaired a working group on Virtual Organizations for the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Grand Challenge Communities in 2010. She is a Science Commons fellow and a nominated member of the Sigma Xi scientific research society. She also serves on the advisory board for hackNY.org, and on the joint advisory committee for the NSF's EarthCube, the effort to build a geosciences-integrating cyberinfrastructure. She is an editorial board member for Open Research Computation and Open Network Biology. She completed her Ph.D. and law degrees at Stanford University.
Her Erdös Number is 3.
Ongoing national and global cyberinfrastructure initiatives pose significant information organization challenges. Research targeting metadata helps address these challenges. This presentation covers a set of studies investigating technical, conceptual, and semantic-driven metadata solutions for organizing the deluge of digital data. The presentation introduces the Dryad data repository and the HIVE ontology environment; outlines motivating research questions and methods; and highlights key findings to date, noting the wider implications of this work. Further, I will describe new research emphases, including work as a Data Science Fellow at the National Consortium for Data Science, in affiliation with the Renaissance Computing Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I conclude by discussing how research focusing on metadata is an integral component of information organization and integrates with the I School environment.
For most of history, health care was centered around the doctor’s office or hospital. It was the era of the lone practitioner, the omniscient physician to whom patients turned to treat their ailments. That was the industrial age of medicine.
Today, health care is much more complex. The proliferation of information available to physicians and to their patients has fundamentally shifted the locus of information and power to patients. In the information age of medicine, we must optimize the use of information, technology, tools, and teams. We need to turn masses of patient data, science, and clinical evidence into clinical knowledge. This information must be available to patients, physicians, and care teams. And they must have access to technology and tools to make the right thing easier to do.
Health care must transform in order to meet the challenges of the information age and to address the crisis of affordability and value in health care. We must become a learning industry. We need to draw from all parts of the industry; harnessing our collective knowledge, working collaboratively, and learning together. We can’t treat our way out of the health care crisis. We must learn our way out of it.
Many companies and observers are excited about the possibility of competitive advantage from analytics on "big data," but many don’t understand the differences between big and small data analytics. There are also substantial differences in how large, established organizations and startups approach big data. In this presentation, Tom Davenport will describe what organizations are attempting to accomplish with big data. Several leading examples of companies—large firms and startup—that are aggressively pursuing big data will be presented. Davenport will then describe how big data differs from previous approaches to analytics and data management on small data. Finally, he'll address some of the key factors that big and small data analytics have in common, and will describe his ideas on their integration using the “Analytics 3.0” framework he has developed.
Catalyst is a £1.9M UK funded research project looking at how digital technologies either promote or act as a barrier to social change. Catalyst has developed a novel approach to such research which involves building partnerships of academics and non-academics (community organizations, charities, social enterprises etc.) to jointly imagine and develop digital technologies to address particular social agendas. Catalyst is run as a framework of projects — or sprints — in which teams form and very quickly work together on new ideas with long term sustainability in mind from the start. To date, Catalyst has involved around 70 community groups as well as academics from seven different disciplines (computing, psychology, sociology, management, health and medicine, art and design, linguistics). Projects to date have worked with charities for the homeless, adults on the autism spectrum, local sustainability initiatives, and the use of social media to connect communities.
In this talk, Jon Whittle gives an overview of the Catalyst project, describes its methods and approaches, and reflects on what has been learned about doing research with and for communities outside the university.
How should we strike the right balance between national security and privacy and civil liberties in federal counterterrorism programs? Join members of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to discuss the importance of government transparency regarding counterterrorism efforts, international issues raised by US surveillance programs, the impact of NSA programs on US industry and the Internet, and the Board’s role going forward.
The U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is a bipartisan independent federal agency. Chairman David Medine and board members Rachel Brand, Elisebeth Collins Cook, and James Dempsey will discuss the Board's recent report and recommendations on the NSA telephony metadata program and reform of the operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
David Reiley presents the results of a randomized experiment with 1.6 million customers measuring positive causal effects of online advertising for a major retailer. The advertising profitably increases purchases by 5%. 93% of the increase occurs in brick-and-mortar stores; 78% of the increase derives from consumers who never click the ads. This large sample reaches the statistical frontier for measuring economically relevant effects. Econometric efficiency was improved by supplementing experimental variation with non-experimental variation caused by consumer browsing behavior. This experiment provides a specification check for observational difference-in-differences and cross-sectional estimators; the latter exhibits a large negative bias three times the estimated experimental effect.
A timely and engaging conversation with Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties director at the ACLU of Northern California.
We will be exploring the latest updates related to NSA spying — what we now know, what we still don’t know, and opportunities in Congress, the courts, companies, and in communities to rein in warrantless surveillance and better safeguard privacy and free speech.
Big data brings us challenges, but also hopes. This talk discusses these challenges and hopes from the semantic perspective. I will present two use cases to demonstrate the potential of semantic technologies for data integration and data analysis. The first use case discusses how to integrate researcher profiling data from different universities using their faculty annual report data. The second use case focuses on how to integrate public knowledge embedded in experimental data and literature data to facilitate drug discovery. It highlights some foreseeable future changes for search and some issues that urgently need to be solved.
How is the Internet experienced in the margins of the global economy?
In her new book, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana, I School professor Jenna Burrell presents a user study set initially in the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana but gradually expanded to include roadside youth clubs, churches, secondhand computer shops, and electronic waste dumps. This talk offers two threads of analysis from the book. First, an examination of the youth who used the Internet in these spaces to cultivate foreign contacts through Yahoo! chatrooms and dating sites and how they made sense of the frequent and often sudden breakdowns in their online relationships. Second, an argument for the supply of secondhand computers imported from abroad by Ghanaian transnational family businesses as a process innovation that made the Internet cafés materially feasible despite Ghana’s economic and infrastructural limitations.
The book bridges between science and technology studies and African studies to demonstrate how studying spaces of cultural discontinuity and where the more erratic processes of globalization operate can contribute new insights to the way we theorize about users.
What role will museums and libraries play in the information technology landscape of the future? Todd Carter presents his vision of museums and libraries empowered by Web 2.0 and crowd-sourcing technologies.
He will focus on improving media annotation with open-sourced anthologies, linked open data, tagging with linked data URIs, semantics, machines, and crowd-sourced human computation.
Todd Carter is the CEO and co-founder of Tagasauris, Inc., a metadata curation platform that incorporates crowd-sourcing, machine learning, linked open data, and the semantic web. Todd is widely respected as a leader in the digital asset, photography, and linked open data community, with over 20 years experience working with photo archives, libraries, museums, and information technology systems. Tagasauris has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Business Week, The Economist and others. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Tagasauris and The Museum of the City of New York a grant to annotate the museum's archive. Tagasauris is rolling out it's first photo product in 2012 and hopes to be a game-changer in the media industry.
Join us for a discussion with author Howard Rheingold. In his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold asks, how can we use digital media so that they help us become empowered participants rather than passive consumers; grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking neurotics? In Net Smart, he demonstrates how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.
Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he presents a lesson on networks and network building.
There is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.
Everything we do online leaves traces: our tweets, Facebook likes, and YouTube views. Currently, Big Data is all about sifting through cloud stores of these traces with little question as to why those traces exist. Big Data analyses are based on data that are already collected; they are not about asking what should be collected to answer important social and motivational questions. I ask: What motivates people to do what they do? And how can we build predictive models of what people do based on their contextualized and emerging interests, and not just their numerical data. Finding the reasons why people do what they do, and why they create the data trails in the first place, invites a new set of questions and demands a new set of methods.
I present investigations into uncovering and understanding these motivations through three areas of inquiry: genre classification, topic prediction, and event detection. I propose changes for how we measure engagement, how we design system instrumentation, and how we design for data collection, aggregation and summarization. These changes have immediate implications on how we understand human behavior online and build new experiences, and they bring ramifications for the next generation of large data solutions.
There is a great realignment happening that is changing the way the world sees itself. This realignment is the product of economic globalization, amazing advances in technology and the end of a monistic media age.
The world has, for a generation, been dominated by massive Western media companies who control the most influential media: television. In the coming years, television will realign alongside social media to a pluralistic world media culture within which many new narratives will vie for our attention.
Whenever media evolves so does society. There are major challenges ahead for the simplistic binary narratives spun by television, good vs. evil, black vs. white, red vs. blue, right vs. wrong. Humanity is more complex that that, and we will be confronting that complexity head-on from now on.
A global struggle for control of the Internet is now underway. At stake are no less than civil liberties, privacy, and even the character of democracy in the 21st century.
Many commentators have debated whether the Internet is ultimately a force for freedom of expression and political liberation, or for alienation, and repression. Rebecca MacKinnon, author of the new book Consent of the Networked, moves the debate about the Internet’s political impact to a new level. It is time, she says, to stop arguing over whether the Internet empowers individuals and societies, and address the more fundamental and urgent question of how technology should be structured and governed to support the rights and liberties of all the world’s Internet users.
Drawing upon two decades of experience as an international journalist, co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, Chinese Internet censorship expert, and Internet freedom activist, MacKinnon offers a framework for concerned citizens to understand the complex and often hidden power dynamics amongst governments, corporations, and citizens in cyberspace. She warns that a convergence of unchecked government actions and unaccountable company practices threatens the future of democracy and human rights around the world.
Our freedom in the Internet age depends on whether we defend our rights on digital platforms and networks in the same way that people fight for their rights and accountable governance in physical communities and nations, claims MacKinnon. It is time to stop thinking of ourselves as passive “users” of technology and instead act like citizens of the Internet — as netizens — and take ownership and responsibility for our digital future.
Scientific computation is emerging as absolutely central to the scientific method, but the prevalence of very relaxed practices is leading to a credibility crisis affecting many scientific fields. It is impossible to verify most of the results that computational scientists present at conferences and in papers today. Reproducible computational research, in which all details of computations — code and data — are made conveniently available to others, is necessary for a resolution of this crisis. This requires a multifaceted approach including policy solutions, computational tools for data and code dissemination, curation and archiving, and open licensing frameworks such as the Reproducible Research Standard.
Howard Rheingold offers a glimpse of the future of high-end online learning in which motivated self-learners collaborate via a variety of social media to create, deliver, and learn an agreed curriculum: a mutant variety of pedagogy that more closely resembles a peer-agogy. Rheingold proposes that our intention should be to teach ourselves how to teach ourselves online, and to share what we learn. He will show how the use of social media in courses he has taught about social media issues led him to co-redesign his curriculum, which led to more active participation by students in co-teaching the course.
We used to know how to know things. That’s how we guided our businesses, our government, our daily lives. But now there is so much to know and so much conflicting advice to listen to. It seems like everyone’s an expert, and no one agrees with anyone else.
This looks like a problem, but it actually can be a source of tremendous strength. It turns out that our old system of knowledge was based around the limitations of paper, a disconnected, expensive medium that managed a world that was too big to know by cutting down on what we had to deal with. There were of course advantages to that, but they came at the cost of throwing out most of what the world was trying to tell us.
In the new knowledge ecology, knowledge takes on the properties of its new medium, the Net. That means knowledge has become huge, it's connected, and it embraces disagreement and differences. The key is to think about knowledge not as a set of content but as a network: the smartest person in the room is now the room itself. Then the question is, how can you build, maintain, and nurture a smart network?
What does it mean to think about culture and community before one thinks about technology? And how could that paradigm shift allow scholars and professionals to re-imagine solutions that think past net delusions around grassroots political movements, and empower community decision-making in the developing world, indigenous knowledge around climate change or cultural heritage, and communication between states and citizens? This talk takes us to several places where I have focused my fieldwork on technology and culture, and community-driven design, including Egypt's Tahrir Square, the Zuni Nation of New Mexico, the Kyrgyz Steppe, and Rural India. Across these projects, I argue for the power of thinking of both culture and technology as dynamic, and mutually co-constructed, introducing design, fieldwork, and research approaches toward the study of global media and information.
Lada Adamic is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information and an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. She is also affiliated with EECS. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure. Her projects have included identifying expertise in online question and answer forums, studying the dynamics of viral marketing, and characterizing the structure in blogs and other online communities. She has received an NSF CAREER award, and best paper awards from Hypertext'08, ICWSM'10 and '11, and the most influential paper of the decade award from Web Intelligence'11.
In this talk new media scholar Rhonda McEwen examines the context for the emergence of social media and explores the subject beyond superficial understandings of software use, to engage in debates regarding the consequences of these media for our sociality. She will begin with a reflection on a timeline representing the rise of social media, then shares research findings from four of her new media projects — as well as drawing on current affairs — to describe the roles of Facebook, SMS, Skype, Blogs, LinkedIn, and Twitter in the areas of transitions, design, critique, and praxis.
Technology is no longer the limiting factor, so what should we do? More than just rejecting the industrial model of learning, we need to think further. We can draw on different models of cognition and learning, and emerging technology capabilities, to propose new approaches to achieving our goals. We need to look for outside inspirations for rethinking what education might mean. Our reach should transcend learning and look to truly transformative experiences. Come explore the possibilities and co-create the future of learning design.
More than a year after the Google Book Settlement fairness hearing, Judge Chin ruled that the settlement was not fair and could not be approved. In this talk, Pam Samuelson explains why she thinks the failure of this settlement was inevitable. It will also discuss the options available after the failure of the settlement and why some of these options are more likely or desirable than others.
The past decade has seen great interest in information and communication technologies applied to international development, an endeavor sometimes abbreviated ICTD. Can mobile phones be used to improve rural healthcare? How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? What value is wireless technology to a farmer earning a dollar a day?
In this panel, four prominent thinkers active in ICTD debate the potential for electronic technologies to contribute to the socio-economic development of the world’s impoverished communities. Eric Brewer is a UC Berkeley professor who develops wireless technologies to connect rural communities. Megan Smith is vice president of new business development at Google and managing director of Google.org. Kentaro Toyama is co-founder of Microsoft Research India, and a computer scientist turned technology skeptic. Wayan Vota is a senior director at Inveneo, a non-profit that works to provide information technology to underserved communities of the developing world.
Health care reform and the recent economic downturn are placing unprecedented pressure on the health care system to provide consumers with value. Patients, purchasers, regulators, and other key stakeholders are demanding that care be readily accessible, proactive, and focused on improving health while containing costs. Many in the health care system are developing novel strategies to provide these services including new delivery models centered on patient-centricity, health information technology, and integrated delivery systems. The lecture will discuss how these forces interact as well as the challenges and opportunities they afford in improving the U.S. health care system.
The last decade has seen the organic growth of the web as a platform, enabling near-frictionless community-building, social communication, and collective action. But the institutions citizens support to represent our collective will and achieve our common goals have been left behind, largely by their own design. Today, several factors are converging to make re-crafting of government possible, and a key ingredient are the very hackers and designers who see the enormous opportunity to build a “citizen Internet.”
Traditional businesses follow a simple formula: create a product or service, sell it, collect money. But in the last few years a fundamentally different model has taken root — one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more peer-to-peer power. Pioneering entrepreneur Lisa Gansky calls it the Mesh and reveals why it will soon dominate the future of business.
Mesh companies create, share and use social media, wireless networks, and data crunched from every available source to provide people with goods and services at the exact moment they need them, without the burden and expense of owning them outright. Gansky reveals how there is real money to be made and trusted brands and strong communities to be built in helping your customers buy less but use more.
Wired has declared “the web is dead.” We will look at several technologies and information systems that have died (or are on life support) — pigeon post, the area code — and others that are thriving — mobile applications, cable, World of Warcraft — and try to figure out whether the web is going the way of the dodo. Will our grandchildren know what a URL is? We will connect the web to ideas of location and ask: what is the meaning of place, in the digital age?
Slides from this lecture are available at http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/20101027bahat
According to the article on Hypermedia in Wikipedia, Ted Nelson coined the term in 1963 and published it in 1965. The definition in the article states that “hypermedia is used as a logical extension of the term hypertext in which graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information” and the World Wide Web is presented as a classical example. But it can be argued that the characteristics of hypermedia and their use in global collaborations go back much further in time. At the beginning of the 20th century the Belgian pioneer of knowledge organization Paul Otlet (1868–1944) began exploring “substitutes for the book” and to find new technologies to order and to link fragments of texts, images, sound, etc., for scholarly collaborations on a global level. Otlet sketched and commissioned hundreds of drawings of what we would call nowadays interfaces to synthesize global knowledge. It will be argued that Paul Otlet’s views and visualizations on substitutes for the codex book, interfaces, infrastructures and protocols for collective annotating by scholars might be relevant for recent discussions on the provenance and evidence of information in Web 2.0 and Semantic Web solutions for e-research, in particular in the digital humanities.
Have you ever watched someone deeply engaged in a video game and performing a highly complex but completely artificial task with incredible competence? Could that focus and attention be bottled and used for something serious? We're convinced it can. In the world of collaboration taking place in the online role-playing games, every day (and night) tens of thousands of teams of 5 to 100's of people from multiple time zones, countries and cultures, each with different and highly complementary skills self-assemble around extremely challenging goals. This sounds a lot like the new world of global business collaboration. The psychological principles and affordances found in MMOs have much to teach us about teamwork, leadership, innovation, urgency, and incentives.
To be clear, we are not talking about just using games for training and simulation, although these are wonderful applications. We expect a range of uses that range from borrowing a few of the key psychological ingredients from great games like World of Warcraft that will make the workplace more interesting all the way to the full Monty: re-engineering entire jobs so that workers become their avatars, building transparent and persistent reputations for tackling graded challenges with teammates inside a virtual online world as part of a compelling narrative. If this sounds fantastic, it is worth noting that tens of millions of MMO players are already carrying out tasks inside their games that look exactly like the kinds of information work that companies have to pay people to do!
Because business today is dependent on voluntary creativity and collaboration of workers using their tacit knowledge, ignoring game inspired design principles is a huge missed opportunity. Games offer powerful tools for creating alignment, performance and engagement. And like any powerful technology, they can be dangerous if the implications for stakeholders aren't thoughtfully considered.
It accumulates on our hard drives and lurks in our genes. Companies and consultants promise to refine it out of data or distill it into knowledge. It can topple churches and tyrants; the health of democratic societies depends on its free exchange (and free, we're told, is exactly what it wants to be). Its revolution has upended our lives: now we do its work, suffer its fatigue from its explosion, and worry about its widening gap, as we take up our roles in its society, its economy, and its age — not to mention (in a more transitory and purely local way) its school.
So what could it — or not to beg the question, what could they — possibly be? Does "information" name a single concept or a family of concepts? Or is it not really a concept at all, but just a bit of semantic sleight of hand? For starters, it helps to look at how we got here. It turns out that confusion of the meanings of "information" began at least two centuries ago (and as it happens, dictionaries all get the story wrong). "Information" has always been a jerry-built notion that conceals its own inconsistencies, so that it can slip surreptitiously between one sense and another. But ultimately, I'll suggest, that's exactly what has made the term so adaptable and so useful to us: the words we name our ages after are always ones that enable us to leave important things unsaid.
Reputational information helps decision-makers predict a company's or person's future performance based on their past behavior. Our economy is filled with systems that capture and publish reputational information; examples include credit reporting databases, eBay feedback ratings, job references and consumer product reviews . This talk will survey various reputational systems, discuss some lessons about designing and implementing them, and explore how legal regulation can help or hinder the process.
Mitch Kapor was the guest speaker in the Info 290 seminar "Commons-Based Peer Production" on Friday; Kapor is the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation, and a member of the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Most people move through the world tripping on problems in their path. True entrepreneurs look at those problems through a different set of lenses: they see them as opportunities. This lecture will focus on creating value by turning problems on their head. Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, shares surprising stories that come from her courses on creativity and entrepreneurship that demonstrate that by creatively challenging assumptions, breaking the rules, and having a healthy disregard for the impossible you can bring remarkable ideas to life.
As we enter the 21st Century, the Media and Entertainment Industry has undergone changes not seen since mechanization of the theater with the advent of the motion picture camera. Several data points suggest the “tipping point” for digital entertainment (and its accompanying economic model and consumer expectations) is here, putting significant pressure on the traditional monetization and business models for entertainment content. As we enter this new age, Daniel Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Media Solutions Group, shares insights on this “Media and Entertainment Disruption” that has already occurred and the online, social format of storytelling yet to come — ultimately changing the entertainment experience for both media companies and consumers.
In 1987 Robert Solow observed that "We see evidence of the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics." In 2009, the situation is utterly changed; a large and growing body of evidence reveals that IT is affecting not only productivity, but also competition. And technology's impact is not limited to only a few industries, but is instead being felt throughout the economy. Dr. McAfee will first present evidence of IT's deep and broad impact, then offer an explanation for how the humble computer could be having such a large effect. The "Computer Revolution" in business is actually four distinct but related developments. McAfee will describe each of them, then use case studies to show how leading companies are taking advantage of them to advance within their industries.
These days nearly every economic transaction involves a computer in some form or other. What does this mean for economics? I argue that the ubiquity of computers enables new and more efficient contractual forms, better alignment of incentives, more sophisticated data extraction and analysis, creates an environment for controlled experimentation, and allows for personalization and customization. I review some of the long and rich history of these phenomena and describe some of their implications for current and future practices.
We show that Social Security numbers (SSNs) can be accurately predicted from widely available public data, such as individuals' dates and states of birth. Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals' SSNs and their birth data, and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs, thereby heightening the risks of identity theft for millions of US residents. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration's Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies, and quantify novel privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums. They also highlight how well-meaning policies in the area of information security can backfire, because of unanticipated interplays between policies and diverse sources of personal data.
Innovation drives economic growth, our quality of life and is the only hope of addressing the major challenges we face. But America, a cornerstone of innovation throughout the world, has become increasingly short-sighted. By taking innovation for granted we threaten not only our own strength, but the overall global economy. Judy Estrin, technology and business pioneer and author of the new book Closing the Innovation Gap, will talk about how it is essential to reignite sustainable innovation in business, education and government and what is required of business and national leaders to revive organizational, national and the global Innovation Ecosystem.
The Wikipedia Revolution is the first narrative account of the remarkable success story of the "encyclopedia anyone can edit." Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia editor/administrator, academic and journalist, tells how the Internet's free culture community inspired its creation in 2001, and how legions of volunteers have emerged to create over 10 million articles in over 50 languages. The book recounts colorful behind-the-scenes stories of how obsessive map editors, automated software robots, and warring factions have come to shape a complex online community of knowledge gatherers. Learn about the historical underpinnings of Wikipedia: how a Hawaiian vacation and a fringe piece software from Apple Computer inspired the wiki concept and realized the original read-and-write capabilities of the Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web. While Wikipedia has become firmly planted at the top of Google's search results, what are the challenges as sum of all human knowledge becomes more complete, and its problem is not growth, but reliability? Should we be putting so much trust in a resource created by anonymous nobodies?
For 35 years, Dr. John Rutledge has traveled the world advising governments, corporations, pension funds and individual investors on how to create, grow and manage wealth. Dr. Rutledge appears weekly on Forbes on Fox, and is co-host of Fox Business' new live call-in show for people who want to start their own businesses. In his most recent book, Lessons from a Road Warrior, Dr. Rutledge traces the development of his ideas from his boyhood lessons in Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, to his easy-to-understand thermo-economics framework for investing that shapes the way he sees the world today. He uses this thermodynamics-based framework, as well as recent advances in information theory, to help the reader understand the important economic, financial and political forces that shape our lives and determine the value of our homes and stock portfolios. Dr. Rutledge will focus largely on the book's later chapters on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, network failures and the information economy, and the role played by government officials and media in the neuroscience of fear to demonstrate how the current global economic crisis is a network failure of the worldwide information system. The market economy is nothing more than a vast, parallel-processing information network that uses prices to transmit information about scarcity and preferences. But when this information network confronts a world of investors in a prolonged state of fear, caused by the last decade of both terrifyingly real and imagined frightening events, the prevailing panic can lead to system-wide network failure. Dr. Rutledge will discuss how these elevated fear levels can combine with other market factors to obstruct the flow of information — creating cascading network failures, or blackouts, in the markets like the one we are experiencing today. He will also discuss ideas about how to use new media to diffuse the global fears that are driving people into conflict.
The network research community has been challenging itself to conceive of what our global network of 15 years from now should be. While the Internet of today is a great success, it also has limitations that suggest it may not be well-positioned to meet all the requirements we will face as we move into the future. As we consider design options for a future network, we have come to realize that some of the original design decisions, while effective, were not the only way to go. In fact, we could have taken different forks in the road as we designed, and ended up in very different places, perhaps with a network that is equally effective at supporting a wide range of applications, but different in other ways: more secure, easier to install and manage, better aligned to motivate investment, and so on. In this talk, I will identify a few of these alternate designs, and describe how the network they would induce would differ from what we see today. In doing so, I will try to illustrate both the nature of the design process and the variation in outcomes.
The much touted “Internet of Things” requires a global IT infrastructure providing information about "things" in a secure and reliable manner. The EPCglobal Network is a popular industry proposal for such an IT infrastructure. Here, the "things" referred to are physical objects carrying RFID tags with a unique Electronic Product Code (EPC). A DNS-based Object Naming Service (ONS) locates the information sources relevant for a given object. In this talk, we show that EPCglobal's current design harbors some serious privacy and security risks. We also discuss some counter-measures and their effectiveness. In particular, we show how distributed hash tables (DHTs) can be used to improve data access control to reduce dependencies on individual root name servers, and to increase privacy. The strength of privacy protection, however, depends on the availability of secure out-of-band key distribution mechanisms.
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and the UC Services Science, Management, and Engineering Program Uses of novel digital technologies often start with students and are eventually adopted, initially reluctantly, by enterprises. For the past six years much of Grudin's research has focused on early enterprise adoption of communication technologies including instant messaging, weblogs, wikis, and social networking software such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The first half of this presentation will outline a handful of patterns that emerged in Grudin's 20 years of studying technology adoption. Grudin will follow with an overview of enterprise uses of emerging technologies, with some speculation as to where it may be heading.
Large museums try to make extensive use of new media to communicate with their public, but with only limited success. Apart from providing practical information about hours, locations, and shows, museum websites chiefly serve the needs of experts, and do little to prepare ordinary museum-goers for their visits. In this talk, I will report on research done in collaboration with the Roman Forum, the Galleria Borghese, and the Palazzo Barbarini in Rome and the archaeological site of Pompei, and in particular on a study of visitors to the Vatican Museums.
Contemporary practices of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating personal information have placed impossible demands on the concept of privacy. The weight of these demands, in turn, is reflected in norms, laws, policies, and technical requirements that frequently seem to miss the mark, failing to negotiate a reasonable course between unbridled opportunism, on the one hand, and suspicious intransigence, on the other. This talk will present key elements in the theory of contextual integrity, which builds upon structural aspects of social life to enrich our understanding of privacy and its importance as a moral and political value. Allowing context-relative social norms and context-based social values into the scope of analysis enables nuance and subtle discrimination, often missing in other dominant approaches, in modeling and theorizing privacy as well as adjudicating and justifying particular privacy claims.
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Mass Communications at UC Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley Library When Time Magazine named “YOU” as their 2006 Person of the Year, it highlighted what has been deemed the democratization of the media. The term “Web 2.0” was coined to describe this transformation on the internet, where individual volunteers, not institutions, control its content. But many people share doubts about the hype around Web 2.0 and have different ideas about what's significant, what's trivial, and what's irrelevant. Protagonists, such as Andrew Keen, believe that it is not only significant, but is significant enough to threaten “our economy, our culture, and our values.” Please join UC Berkeley Adjunct Professor Paul Duguid and Andrew Keen in a debate about whether Web 2.0 is truly a threat to our culture. Adjunct Professor Geoffrey Nunberg will moderate the debate.
Audio recording (MP3)
According to recent studies by the Pew Center on the Internet And American Life, more than half of American teens online have produced media content and about a third have circulated media that they have produced beyond their immediate friends and family. These statistics reflect the growing importance of participatory culture in the everyday lives of American young people. Work across a range of disciplines suggest that these emerging forms of participatory culture are important sites for informal learning and may be the crucible out of which new conceptions of civic engagement are emerging. Drawing on insights from a recent white paper produced for the MacArthur Foundation, this talk will discuss the need to develop new forms of media literacy pedagogy which reflects this context of a participatory culture, materials which both respond to the ethical challenges confronted by those teens who are already producing and circulating their own media as well as the challenges confronting those youth who are excluded from participation in these on-line worlds as a consequence of lack of access to technologies, skills, competencies, and cultural experiences taken for granted by their contemporaries. These issues can not be understood through a simple opposition between digital natives and digital immigrants, but rather require us to dig deeper into the diverse range of experiences young people have online and the range of different interactions between adults and teens in these new participatory culture. In the course of the presentation, I will be sharing a range of curricular materials and activities being developed by MIT's Project nml to support the teaching of these new social skills and cultural competencies.
In a rapidly-changing, uncertain environment, the ability to think constructively about various future possibilities is more important than ever. "Foresight Specialists", "Scenario Planners", "Trend Spotters" and good old "Futurists" provide a specialized service that few businesses, non-profits, and governments have organically -- and fewer still recognize that they need. I'll talk about why today's futurism has more to do with imagining the possible than thinking the unthinkable, why futurist ethics matters more than futurist economics, and whether futurism might just be the best job out there for the easily-distracted generalist.
A comparative look at the origins, development, and impact of major information technology platforms of the past three decades from the perspective of a leading entrepreneur and software designer who has played a major role in each of them.
Audio recording (MP3)
A comparative look at the origins, development, and impact of major information technology platforms of the past three decades from the perspective of a leading entrepreneur and software designer who has played a major role in each of them.
While much of the focus on intellectual property goes to battles over copyright or patents, we should not forget that a large proportion of such material is not property at all. The public domain is available for all to use. Of particular interest for the public domain is the U.S. government, all of whose work is available without restriction for all of us to use.
In this lecture, Carl Malamud explains the principles of the public domain with particular emphasis on the works of government. He will discuss how government often backs away from the clear principle of no property interests in order to maintain control, and how citizens can change that attitude through concrete actions. Malamud will use his own experience in forcing changes in government policy with numerous agencies to illustrate these general principles.
(A Flash presentation including the audio and Carl's slides/movies is available here.)
In this age where QWERTY communication and point-and-click are implied when I say social networking, face to face can sometimes seem like an inappropriate intrusion and unnecessary add-on — certainly something that we don't need to design for when we outline our services. I will describe a series of studies we did where we blurred boundaries between online and physical space social networking using desktop, personal device and public screen displays, and recent work on the move from online socializing to offline meeting among internet daters. I will use these studies to highlight the omissions in our design reasoning and concomitant surprises. I will more generally speculate on some issues that arise when we extrapolate tacit or explicit metaphors of online sociality to the offline world, and vice versa.
A comparative look at the origins, development, and impact of major information technology platforms of the past three decades from the perspective of a leading entrepreneur and software designer who has played a major role in each of them.
Search has become a critical part of our daily lives and the primary gateway to information and services of all kinds. Much of the success has been driven by the growth of the internet and behind-the-scenes improvements in search technology. However, the search user interface, based on keywords and advanced search operators, has changed very little since the earliest information retrieval systems. In this talk, we discuss the concept of natural language search. Central to this is a new user experience, in which users express queries in natural language and the system responses respect the linguistic information in the query. To realize this vision at broad scope and scale will require advances in a variety of technology areas, including natural language processing, information extraction, knowledge representation, and large-scale search indexing and retrieval systems. In addition, it will require innovations in user interface. Issues include changing user behavior, education, supporting users in formulating effective queries, and managing expectations. With a new search architecture centered on natural language, linguistic and lexical knowledge translate directly into improved capabilities and experiences for end users. This creates a challenge to encode enough knowledge to cross the threshold for a broad application. It also creates an opportunity to establish a framework for introducing new knowledge through automated and community-based approaches. While the challenges are formidable, the opportunities are great. Natural language search has the potential to transform and improve all aspects of the search experience: precision, recall, power, usability, presentation and interaction. We will conclude the talk with a discussion of Powerset, a startup company that is tackling these challenges in an attempt to bring natural language search to the world.
Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, are increasingly developing their own new products and services: Innovation is being democratized. User-innovators—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. The trend toward democratized innovation affects both information products and physical products. Innovation by users can produce an increase in social welfare relative to a manufacturer-only innovation system. Innovation by "lead users" can provide a valuable feedstock for manufacturer innovation. It also can disrupt manufacturers' existing business models. User innovation is so robust that it can actually drive manufacturers out of product design in some fields.
The Microsoft Research Community Technologies group focuses on the study and enhancement of computer mediated collective action systems. In this talk I will present recent developments in projects that highlight and attempt to enhance computer mediated collective action: Netscan, SNARF and AURA. Netscan is a set of tools and services for online communities. Netscan manufactures “social accounting metadata” about Usenet newsgroups and web boards, providing reports about discussion spaces and individuals that highlight patterns of activity and contribution in tabular and graphical forms. We have recently developed faster data update models, new Web service interfaces, a custom community portal page, and a new information visualization application (“Usenet Views”) that makes it simple to map and chart newsgroup communities. New sources of community content, from web boards, forums, discussion boards, email lists, and related repositories of threaded conversation are being analyzed by the Netscan system. SNARF applies the concepts explored in the Netscan project to personal collections of email. SNARF provides tools to implement “social sorting” — reordering email collections based on the strength of different dimensions of the relationship between sender and receiver. For example, using SNARF, unread email from people can be ranked higher if they are often replied to by the user. A by-product of this tool is the generation of a high-dimensional dataset describing the structure and temporal patterns created through the exchange of email overtime. This dataset offers useful insights into the nature of email-based communications. Results from initial deployments of SNARF will be presented along with recent images generated by the SNARF Views extension to SNARF. The AURA: Advanced User Resource Annotation system is a platform for Pocket PCs, Smartphones and mobile PCs that have various kinds of sensors such as barcode readers, digital cameras, WiFi signal strength detection, radio frequency identification (RFID) tag readers, and GPS. Using AURA today, users can scan the barcodes on everyday objects in the home, office, or store and gain access to related information and services such as competitive pricing and product reviews. Other kinds of tags, such as tags placed on art or equipment asset tags, can be easily linked to related data through Web sites or Web service interfaces. This talk covers several developments in the mobile annotation space and describes future directions for AURA and related services.
It is risky for technologists to ignore the non-technical context in which their systems will be deployed, just as it is risky for policy makers to ignore the limits and potential of technology. Yet such insularity is all too common. The results are unfortunate but not surprising. This lecture explores the structure dialogs take to bring about what might be termed "security failings" by revisiting: identity theft, electronic voting, digital right management, and the overall vulnerabilities of today's deployed software.
Much of what we want to know about other people is not directly perceivable. Are you a nice person? Did you really like the cake I baked? If we got married, would you be a good parent to our children? Instead, we rely on signals, which are perceivable features or actions that indicate the presence of those hidden qualities. Yet not all signals are reliable. It is beneficial for the con-man to seem nice, for the guest to seem to like the burnt cake, for the unsuitable suitor to seem as attractive as possible. While these deceptions benefit the deceiver, they may be quite costly for the recipient. What keeps signals honest — and why are some signals more reliable than others? Signaling theory provides a framework for understanding these dynamics. Among other things, it shows how the cost of many seemingly extravagant displays is not wasteful expenditure, but useful for ensuring the reliability of the display as a signal. In this talk I will show how signaling theory can be used for the design and analysis of social technologies. It is especially well suited for this domain, for in mediated interactions there are few qualities that can be directly observed: everything is signal.
Co-sponsored by: UC Berkeley School of Information, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, boalt.org. With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today's emerging networked information environment. In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing - and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained or lost by the decisions we make today.
Explore the Future of Information with Geoffrey Nunberg and panelists Mimi Ito, Brewster Kahle, and Bradley Horowitz. For more information about this event please contact kristi@ischool.berkeley.edu.
Media have changed ideas about the self and society for centuries, from vernacular print in the Reformation to the 20th Century’s reference to life’s intense moments as being “like a movie.” What might happen as today’s media blur accelerates? It is not just that news, information and entertainment are in continual overlap, with print, audio and visual streams interchanging. The ideal is that no information is lost, and we are “always on,” in perpetual connection with continual feeds. In this talk I will discuss some of the major trends in their historic context, and sketch out the likely consequences.
Cautious cars? We already have them, cautious and sometimes frightened. Cranky kitchens, not yet, but they are coming. Our products are getting smarter, more intelligent, and more demanding, or if you like, bossy. This trend brings with it many special problems and unexplored areas of applied psychology. In particular, our devices are now part of a human-machine social ecosystem, and therefore they need social graces, superior communicative skills, and even emotions: machine emotions, to be sure, but emotions nonetheless. In this talk I explore the reasons for such statements, the issues that need to be considered, and the dangers that have already occurred because designers still think of each device as alone, and self-contained.
The sudden and unexpected importance of the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by tens of thousands of volunteers and coordinated in a deeply decentralized fashion, represents a radical new modality of content creation by massively distributed collaboration. This talk will discuss the unique principles and values which have enabled the Wikipedia community to succeed and will examine the intriguing prospects for application of these methods to a broad spectrum of intellectual endeavors.