The following speakers will present their work at the conference, promising lively and stimulating discussions.

Opening keynotes

Claudia Perlich serves as Chief Scientist at m6d and in this role designs, develops, analyzes and optimizes the machine learning that drives digital advertising to prospective customers of brands. An active industry speaker and frequent contributor to industry publications, Claudia enjoys serving as a guide in world of data and was recently named winner of the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) Grand Innovation Award and was selected as member of the Crain’s NY annual 40 Under 40 list. She has published numerous scientific articles, and holds multiple patents in machine learning and won many data mining competitions. Prior to joining m6d in February 2010, Claudia worked in Data Analytics Research at IBM’s Watson Research Center, concentrating on data analytics and machine learning for complex real-world domains and applications. Claudia has a PhD in Information Systems from NYU and an MA in Computer Science from Colorado University. Claudia takes active interest in the making of the next generation of data scientists and is teaching “Data Mining for Business Intelligence” in the Stern MBA program at NYU.

Robert Tarjan is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and a Senior Fellow at Hewlett-Packard. He is the discoverer of several graph algorithms, including Tarjan’s off-line least common ancestors algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. A Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, Tarjan’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1986 Turing Award “for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures,” and the 1983 Nevanlinna Prize in Information Science. He was elected an ACM Fellow in 1994.

Paper contributors

Tarleton Gillespie is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and the Department of Information Science at Cornell University with an affiliation with the Department of Science and Technology Studies. He is the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2007). His research areas include information policy (particularly freedom of expression and copyright); the relationship between the digital industry and public discourse; and the turn to technical mechanisms of social control. His current research on the “politics of platforms” examines how content sharing platforms, mobile app providers, and social networking sites set and enforce norms and policies for appropriate content, through both community governance and algorithmic curation, that shape the contours of online public discourse. He co-curates the blog Culture Digitally.

Lucas Introna lectures in Technology, Organisation and Ethics at the Centre for the Study of Technology and Organisation, Lancaster University. Previously he lectured in Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interest is the social study of technology and its consequences for society. In particular he is concerned with the ethics and politics of technology. He is co-editor Ethics and Information Technology and acted as associate editor for Management Information Systems Quarterly and Information Systems Research. He is also a founding member of the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT) and an active member of IFIP WG 8.2, The Society for Philosophy in Contemporary World (SPCW), and a number of other academic and professional societies. His most recent work includes a book Management, Information and Power published by Macmillan, and various academic papers in journals and conference proceedings on a variety of topics such as: sociomateriality, phenomenology of technology, information and power, privacy, surveillance, information technology and post-modern ethics, and virtual organisations. He holds degrees in Management, Information Systems and Philosophy.

Daniel Neyland. My research interests cover issues of governance, accountability and ethics in forms of science, technology and organization. I draw on ideas from ethnomethodology, science and technology studies (in particular forms of radical and reflexive scepticism, constructivism, Actor-Network Theory and the recent STS turn to markets and other forms of organizing) and my research is ethnographic in orientation. My substantive interests are focused on: traffic management, waste, airports, algorithms, biometrics, parking, signposts, malaria and the utility of social science, ideas of equivalence, parasitism, the mundane, market failures, problems and solutions, deleting, value and publicity. These ideas form themselves into a variety of publications and research projects. My current research involves an on-going ethnographic study of attempts to develop a ‘smart’ and ‘ethically aware’ surveillance system (EU FP7 project ADDPRIV). The project features collaboration between industry and academia, particularly oriented toward using algorithms to build a video surveillance system which sees very little and stores almost no data. The project provides an experimental location for investigating the practicalities and value(s) of witnessing, deletion, accountability and forgetfulness, amongst other things. My recent and current writing includes: a study of markets as solutions to problems, the on-going challenges of managing values, attempts to build a world into Fair Trade brands, a reflexively sceptical analysis of product launch, and a forthcoming book on Mundane Governance. I am about to launch a major 5 year ERC funded research programme which asks: Can Markets Solve Problems? This will incorporate research projects and researchers working on: security (including a place for algorithms), health, the environment and education.

Frank Pasquale has taught information and health law at Seton Hall since 2004. He has published over 20 scholarly articles, and is currently writing a book called The Black Box Society: Technologies of Search, Reputation, and Finance (under contract with Harvard University Press). Pasquale’s research agenda focuses on challenges posed to information law by rapidly changing technology, particularly in the health care, internet, and finance industries. Pasquale has been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology, and a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School and Cardozo Law School. He was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University. He has testified before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, appearing with the General Counsels of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. He has also presented before a Department of Health & Human Services/Federal Trade Commission Roundtable and panels of the National Academy of Sciences. Pasquale is a member of the Harvard-Georgetown Working Group on Market Democracy, and an Affiliate Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. He has been named to the Advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He is on the executive board of the Health Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), and has served as chair of the AALS section on Privacy and Defamation. He has blogged at Concurring Opinions since 2006, and he also writes at Balkinization, Madisonian, Health Reform Watch, and the Health Law Profs Blog. He has been quoted in the Financial Times, New York Times, Economist, CNN, and many other media outlets, and has written for the Boston Review.

Discussants

Mike Ananny is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, an Affiliated Faculty with USC’s Science, Technology and Society research cluster, and a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He studies the public significance, and sociotechnical dynamics, of networked news systems. He has held fellowships and scholarships with Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, the LEGO Corporation, Interval Research; was a postdoc with Microsoft’s Research’s Social Media Collective; and has worked or consulted with LEGO, Mattel and Nortel Networks, helping to generate research concepts and prototypes for new product lines and services. He received a PhD from Stanford University (Communication), SM from the MIT Media Lab (Media Arts & Sciences), and BSc from the University of Toronto (Human Biology & Computer Science). He has published in a variety of venues including Critical Studies in Media Communication, International Journal of Communication, American Behavioral Scientist, Television & New Media, the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics, and the Association for Computing Machinery’s conferences on Computer-Human Interaction and Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. He is currently working on a book (under contract with MIT Press) on a public right to hear in the age of a networked press.

Kate Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Visiting Professor at the MIT Centre for Civic Media, and a Senior Fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU. Over the last ten years she has researched the social, political and cultural contexts of networked technologies. Her current work focuses on a range of data practices, from the ethics of big data, crisis informatics, networked journalism, and the everyday uses of mobile and social media. She has conducted large and small- scale ethnographic studies in Australia, India and the US. Previously, she was an Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, and a founding member of the Media and Communications Department at the University of Sydney. Kate currently sits on the editorial boards of the Fibreculture Journal: Digital Media, Networks, and Transdisciplinary Critique, and Media International Australia. Her book on technology, culture and youth, Adult Themes, won the Academy of the Humanities medal and the Manning Clark National Cultural Award. Her work has featured in The Wall Street Journal, BBC’s The World Today, ABC, and CBC, and her journal articles have been translated into multiple languages.

Lisa Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American book history, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is entitled Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture and was published by the MIT Press in 2006. She has a new edited collection, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (MIT 2013), while current projects include a monograph, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, forthcoming from Duke. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She joins Steinhardt after teaching at Harvard University and at The Catholic University of America.

Moritz Hardt is a post-doctoral researcher in the Theory Group at IBM Research Almaden. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at Princeton University in 2011, advised by Boaz Barak. His current work focuses on the problem of analyzing data sets that deal with human beings. The algorithmic challenges that arise include privacy, fairness and robustness. His research has contributed to state of the art algorithms achieving the privacy guarantee known as Differential Privacy, as well as a new rigorous notion of fairness in classification.

Matthew L. Jones specializes in the history of science and technology, focused on early modern Europe and on recent information technologies. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2012-13 and a Mellon New Directions fellow for 2012-15, he is researching Data Mining: The Critique of Artificial Reason, 1963-2005, a historical and ethnographic account of “big data,” its relation to statistics and machine learning, and its growth as a fundamental new form of technical expertise in business and scientific research. He has just completed Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage. Publications include: “Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property,” in Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin, eds., Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012); The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2006); “Descartes’s Geometry as Spiritual Exercise,” Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001).

Karrie Karahalios is an Associate Professor in UIUC’s Department of Computer Science. Her research focuses on the design and implementation of communication channels for interaction between people in networked environments. These channels involve sensing the social cues people perceive in networked electronic spaces and incorporating them into the physical and virtual interface such that mediated interaction becomes intuitive and breaks away from the traditional computer screen. Her work primarily investigates sociable systems for mediated communication. Her research includes projects on assistive and adaptive technologies, visualization to understand conversational dynamics, and the understanding of social networks. Karahalios received the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship for her work in social computing, the Faculty Early-Career Development Award from the US National Science Foundation (NSF CAREER) in the area of human- centered computing. In addition, she is two-time winner of the ACM Best Paper award for research on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) for her work on social media. Karahalios completed a S.B. in electrical engineering, an M.Eng. in electrical engineering and computer science, and an S.M. and Ph.D in media arts and science at MIT. Twitter: @kkarahal, web: http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/people/kkarahal.html

Martha Poon is a Fellow at the London School of Economics, in the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation, where she is working on a book manuscript entitled What Lenders See. Her main research project is to trace the history a proprietary information technology called FICO, the standard for managing credit risk in the US consumer credit industry. Martha studies modern finance as a set of historically situated practices in the same way anthropologists study other systems of value. In her research, she draws attention to the role of algorithms and information infrastructures, built by private companies, in the process of contemporary financial innovation. Her first paper, which traced the origins of subprime mortgage lending to the adoption of FICO by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was awarded the 2008 Hacker-Mullins Prize from the Science Knowledge and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. Martha is a graduate of the Science Studies Program at University of California San Diego, where her research was supported by a dissertation improvement grant from the National Science Foundation. She has been a visitor at CSI-ENSMP (Paris), the Hagley Museum and Library (Delaware), the Centre on Organizational Innovation at Columbia University, as well as Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU (New York). Last summer, she trained with and observed financial journalists on US markets desk of the Financial Times.

Tal Zarsky is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Haifa – Faculty of Law. His research focuses on Information Privacy, Internet Policy, Social Networks, Telecommunications Law and Online Commerce, Reputation and Trust. He also teaches and studies Contract and Property law and theory. He has written and presented his work on these issues in a variety of forums in the US, Europe and Israel In addition, he has advised various Israeli regulators and legislators on related matters. Dr. Zarsky was a Fellow at the Information Society Project, at Yale Law School and a Global Hauser Fellow, at NYU Law School. He completed his doctorate dissertation, which focused on Data Mining in the Internet Society, at Columbia University – School of Law. Dr. Zarsky also participated in the “Data Mining without Discrimination” project, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as well as other national and international research projects. Among others, his current research and recent publications examine the implications and legality of advanced data mining practices, while focusing on their relation to the social and legal concepts of transparency, discrimination, social sorting and due process.

Closing speaker

Paul Dourish is a Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology, and co-directs the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. His research focuses primarily on understanding information technology as a site of social and cultural production; his work combines topics in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and science and technology studies. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, and was elected to the CHI Academy in 2008 in recognition of his contributions to Human-Computer Interaction. He is the author of two books: “Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction” (MIT Press, 2001), which explores how phenomenological accounts of action can provide an alternative to traditional cognitive analysis for understanding the embodied experience of interactive and computational systems; and, with Genevieve Bell, “Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing” (MIT Press, 2011), which examines the social and cultural aspects of the ubiquitous computing research program. Before coming to UCI, he was a Senior Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory of Xerox PARC; he has also held research positions at Apple Computer and at Rank Xerox EuroPARC. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College, London, and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Evgeny Morozov. I’m the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and a contributing editor at The New Republic. In 2010-2012 I was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. In 2009-2010 I was a fellow at Georgetown University and in 2008-2009 I was a fellow at the Open Society Foundations (where I also sat on the board of the Information Program between 2008 and 2012). Between 2006 and 2008 I was Director of New Media at Transitions Online. I’ve written for The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. My monthly Slate column is syndicaetd in El Pais, Corriere della Sera, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Folha de S.Paulo and several other newspapers. My personal site is evgenymorozov.com

Moderators

Heather Patterson is a postdoctoral research fellow at MCC and in the Information Law Institute at New York University. Patterson researches changing social norms regarding personal information sharing and expectations of privacy, with an eye toward developing policy solutions that facilitate context-appropriate information flow. She received a JD from the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 2012 and a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington in 2006. At Berkeley Law, Patterson worked within the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic to develop a framework for evaluating the privacy implications of biometric technologies such as face recognition, iris scanning, and gait recognition, and to develop privacy standards for emerging Smart Grid technologies before the California Public Utilities Commission. Prior to law school, Patterson used behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to assess the cognitive and neural basis of language perception, face recognition, and biological motion detection. She also holds an MA in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin and a BS in neurobiology and physiology from Purdue University.

Phoebe Sengers is a faculty member in Information Science and Science & Technology Studies at Cornell, where she leads the Culturally Embedded Computing group. She is a member of the field of Computer Science and is affiliated with Visual Studies and Art. Dr. Sengers is a computer scientist and a cultural theorist, working primarily in Human-Computer Interaction and cultural studies of technology. She develops culturally embedded systems; i.e., new kinds of interactive technology that respond to and encourage critical reflection on the place of technology in culture. Specifically, she analyzes IT in the context of North American consumer culture and the rise of efficiency, productivity, and faith in technoscience as hegemonic cultural values. She uses insights from cultural analysis of IT to identify and rethink the assumptions underlying technologies, to build new applications for computing, and to develop new techniques for designing and evaluating technologies. Dr. Sengers current research focuses on two core themes: (1) working towards sustainable IT design, with awareness of the central role that computing and other technologies play in consumer culture; (2) understanding the difference it makes in IT design to take the humanities and arts as central to our forms of knowledge production, in addition to science and engineering. A major component of her current work is a long-term design-ethnographic and historical study of sociotechnological change in the small, traditional fishing community of Change Islands, Newfoundland. Previously, Dr. Sengers worked at the Media Arts Research Studies group at the German National Computer Science Research Center (GMD) in Bonn, Germany and she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. In August 1998, she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a self-defined interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Theory.

Katherine Strandburg concentrates her teaching and research in the areas of intellectual property law, cyberlaw, and information privacy law. She is particularly interested in understanding how the law in these areas might accommodate and reflect the importance of collaborative and emergent collective behavior.  Prior to coming to NYU, Prof. Strandburg was Professor of Law at DePaul University College of Law. She has been a visiting professor at NYU, Fordham, and Illinois law schools. Professor Strandburg obtained her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School with high honors in 1995 and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She is an experienced litigator, is licensed to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and recently has authored several amicus briefs to the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit Court of Appeals dealing with patent law issues. She is past Chair of the AALS Section on Intellectual Property.  Prior to her legal career, Professor Strandburg was a research physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, having received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984 and conducted postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon. She was a visiting faculty member of the physics department at Northwestern University from 1990-1992.

Organizing team

Solon Barocas is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and a Student Fellow at the Information Law Institute at New York University. He is also affiliated with the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, where he works under the Algorithmic Living research theme. He studies epistemological issues with big data, the everyday practices of data miners, and various ethical concerns raised by applied machine learning. Solon has been a visitor at the Centre for the Study of Invention & Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London, and he has worked with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, the Center for Global Communication Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Stern School of Business at New York University, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He received an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a BA in Art-Semiotics and International Relations from Brown University.

Sophie Hood is a research fellow in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and in the Information Law Institute at New York University. Her work examines issues at the intersection of new media technologies and adjudication. Her most recent research focuses on privacy and publicity in online court records. She is also studying how the publication of court opinions affects data-driven legal research, lawyering, and even the path of the common law. Sophie has previously studied the effect of new technologies on the media industry at Harvard Business School. She graduated from Williams College with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and received her J.D. from Yale Law School. After law school, Sophie served as a law clerk to the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Director of the Information Law Institute. Her areas of expertise span social, ethical, and political implications of information technology and digital media. Nissenbaum’s research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. She has written and edited four books, including Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, which was published in 2010 by Stanford University Press. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, including search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems. Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Malte Ziewitz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Information Law Institute at New York University. Broadly based in Science and Technology Studies (STS), ethnography, and public policy, his research revolves around issues of governance, accountability, and evaluation in digitally networked environments. His recent work explores evaluative practice in healthcare and and search engine optimization (SEO); algorithmic ordering; the history and performativity of internet governance; the ethical implications of presence technologies; and the nature and uses of “crowd wisdom” in regulation. As Principal Investigator, he headed the ESRC-funded How’s My Feedback? project, a collaborative design experiment to rethink and evaluate online review and rating websites. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council, the German National Academic Foundation, an OII/PGP Scholarship, the Heinz Schwarzkopf Foundation, the Keble Association, and the German Academic Exchange Service. Malte holds a DPhil from Oxford University, an MPA from Harvard University, and a First State Exam in Law from the University of Hamburg.