Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
This paper reports on empirical work conducted to study perceptions of unfair treatment caused by... more This paper reports on empirical work conducted to study perceptions of unfair treatment caused by automated computational systems. While the pervasiveness of algorithmic bias has been widely acknowledged, and perceptions of fairness are commonly studied in Human Computer Interaction, there is a lack of research on how unfair treatment by automated computational systems is experienced by users from disadvantaged and marginalised backgrounds. There is a need for more diversification in terms of the investigated users, domains, and tasks, and regarding the strategies that users employ to reduce harm. To unpack these issues, we ran a prescreened survey of 663 participants, oversampling those with at-risk characteristics. We collected occurrences and types of conflicts regarding unfair and discriminatory treatment and systems, as well as the actions taken towards resolving these situations. Drawing on intersectional research, we combine qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to...
Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
The increasing reach and functionality of voice assistants has allowed them to become a general-p... more The increasing reach and functionality of voice assistants has allowed them to become a general-purpose platform for tasks like playing music, accessing information, and controlling smart home devices. In order to maintain the quality of third-party skills and to protect children and other members of the public from inappropriate or malicious skills, platform providers have developed content policies and certification procedures that skills must undergo prior to public release. Unfortunately, research suggests that these measures have been ineffective at curating voice assistant platforms, with documented instances of skills with significant security and privacy problems. This provocation paper outlines how the underlying architectures of these platforms had turned skill certification into a seemingly intractable problem, as well as how current certification methods fall short of their full potential. We present a roadmap for improving the state of skill certification on contemporary voice assistant platforms, including research directions and actions that need to be taken by platform vendors. Promoting this change in domestic voice assistants is especially important, as developers of commercial and industrial assistants or other similar contexts increasingly look to these devices for norms and conventions. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing design and evaluation methods; Natural language interfaces; • Security and privacy → Usability in security and privacy.
Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software ha... more Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for their otherwise hands-free voice assistant. More in line with smartphone app stores, Alexa now offers "voice-forward consent", allowing users to grant skills access to personal data mid-conversation using speech. While more usable and convenient than opening a companion app, asking for consent 'on the fly' can undermine several concepts core to the informed consent process. The intangible nature of voice interfaces further blurs the boundary between parts of an interaction controlled by third-party developers from the underlying platforms. This provocation paper highlights key issues with current verbal consent implementations, outlines directions for potential solutions, and presents five open questions to the research community. In so doing, we hope to help shape the development of usable and effective verbal consent for voice assistants and similar conversational user interfaces. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing design and evaluation methods; Natural language interfaces; • Security and privacy → Usability in security and privacy.
Personal Analytics and Privacy. An Individual and Collective Perspective, 2017
We investigate approaches to personal data analytics that involves the participation of all actor... more We investigate approaches to personal data analytics that involves the participation of all actors in our shared digital culture. We analyse their communities by identifying and clustering social relations using mobile and social media data. The work is part of our effort to develop tools to create a "social data commons", an open research environment that will share innovative tools and data sets to researchers interested in accessing the data that surrounds the production and circulation of digital culture and their actors. This experiment focuses on the groups of clustered relations that are formed within a user's social data traces. Community extraction is a popular part of the analysis of social data. We have applied the technique of Markov Clustering to the Twitter networks of social actors. Qualitatively, we demonstrate that it is more effective than the Louvain method for finding social groups known to the subjects, while still being very simple to implement. We also demonstrate that traces of cell towers captured using our "MobileMiner" mobile application are sufficient to capture significant details about their social relations by the simple application of k-means.
Our article presents a finely granulated perspective on the technical objects of datafication. We... more Our article presents a finely granulated perspective on the technical objects of datafication. We contend that such cross-disciplinary focus provides a more rigorous material grounding for a critic...
Abstract: This dissertation constructs new lines of affinity between Michel Foucault and Marxism,... more Abstract: This dissertation constructs new lines of affinity between Michel Foucault and Marxism, specifically in relation to Communication Studies. It is comprised of both a critical history of oppositional intellectuals, and a postmarxist theory of the biopolitical dynamics of capital. It examines the emergence of Michel Foucault? s later historical and philosophical work concerning the deployment of power/knowledge relations, its reception by and sources in a heterogeneous group of Italian and French post/Marxist intellectuals in the mid-to late- ...
Metadata has jumped from the specialist vernacular of the archivist and programmer to public disc... more Metadata has jumped from the specialist vernacular of the archivist and programmer to public discourse in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Yet the precise nature and import of this seemingly technical artifact remains dimly understood. This chapter will undertake a cold war archaeology of metadata, from analogue information gathered by the East German Stasi to the born digital data accessed by the NSA and GCHQ. Metadata is a key cipher for the contemporary technocultural condition, and the chapter offers a case study of broader shifts in techne (the constitutive relationship between the human and technology) and in labouring practices as afforded by our data-infused digital environment. The chapter provides a concise history of metadata as highly structured data for the information discovery of data objects. Changing surveillance practices reflect the increasingly fine granularity of the digital human to the extent that now we can be considered as data objects. The degree to whi...
If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination... more If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
Operating at a large scale and impacting large groups of people, automated systems can make con... more Operating at a large scale and impacting large groups of people, automated systems can make consequential and sometimes contestable decisions. Automated decisions can impact a range of phenomena, from credit scores to insurance payouts to health evaluations. These forms of automation can become problematic when they place certain groups or people at a systematic disadvantage. These are cases of discrimination-which is legally defined as the unfair or unequal treatment of an individual (or group) based on certain protected characteristics (also known as protected attributes) such as income, education, gender, or ethnicity. When the unfair treatment is caused by automated decisions, usually taken by intelligent agents or other AI-based systems, the topic of digital discrimination arises. Digital discrimination is prevalent in a diverse range of fields, such as in risk assessment systems for policing and credit scores [1], [2]. Digital discrimination is becoming a serious problem, as more and more decisions are delegated to systems increasingly based on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning. Although a significant amount of research has been undertaken from different disciplinary angles to understand this challenge-from computer science to law to sociology-none of these fields have been able to resolve the problem on their own terms. For instance, computational methods to verify and certify bias-free data
This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understandi... more This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing.
Why did News Corporation spend $580 million on MySpace, one of the fastest growing websites on th... more Why did News Corporation spend $580 million on MySpace, one of the fastest growing websites on the internet? Our contention is that it contains a dynamic new source of creative power: what we call ‘immaterial labour 2.0’. MySpace is where (mostly) youth ‘learn’ to expand their cultural and communicative capacities by constructing online subjectivities in an open-ended process of becoming. The labour performed therein is one of modulation and variation in the networked formations that result in an exponential expansion of discrete nodes of both affect and affinity and of potential surplus value. We present immaterial labour 2.0 as an ambivalent modality of both biopower and biopolitical production, and as an exemplar of the paradigm shift underway in our interface with popular culture, media, and information and communication technology. By recalling Dallas Smythe’s ‘audience commodity’ we contrast the ‘producibility’ of subjects in relation to broadcast media with the ‘productivity’ of immaterial labour 2.0 in social networks like MySpace
Abstract taken from the English language original (Immaterial Labour 2.0. or, Learning to Like So... more Abstract taken from the English language original (Immaterial Labour 2.0. or, Learning to Like Social Networks): "Can one already glimpse the outlines of these future forms of resistance,capable of standing up to marketing’s blandishments? Many young people have a strange craving to be ‘motivated’, they’re always asking for special courses and continuing education; it is their job to discover whose ends these serve, just as older people discovered, with considerable difficulty, who was benefiting from disciplines. A snake’s coils are even more intricate than a mole’s burrow." (Deleuze, 1995, p. 182) Facebook is undoubtedly the biggest and brightest new star of the media firmament. There are now 500 million users and counting, making it the world’s second most popular website, behind only Google. More importantly, Facebook users log an average of 60 minutes each day, by visiting the site an astounding 13 times from the time they wake up to the time they go to sleep (Facebook 2011). The superlatives of Facebook are not limited to the social and communicative realm. In early 2011, its market value was pegged at almost $83 B (TechCrunch, 2011a). Given that Facebook has only been open to the general public since the fall of 2006, it seems likely that its social, and political-economic significance will only increase in the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is our contention that social networks like Facebook are not only exemplary of what is increasingly known as the Web 2.0, they are also paradigmatic of an emergent form of 'immaterial labour'.
2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), 2015
If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination... more If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
In this article, the author uses Foucault's largely overlooked but vital concept, the disposi... more In this article, the author uses Foucault's largely overlooked but vital concept, the dispositif, in relation to the recent rise of mobility, explosion of data and proliferation of platforms and apps. With a focus on how data an individual generates increasingly moves autonomously of their control, he presents the dispositif of ‘data motility’ to develop a new materialist analysis of the digital human as a discursive and non-discursive assemblage.
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
This paper reports on empirical work conducted to study perceptions of unfair treatment caused by... more This paper reports on empirical work conducted to study perceptions of unfair treatment caused by automated computational systems. While the pervasiveness of algorithmic bias has been widely acknowledged, and perceptions of fairness are commonly studied in Human Computer Interaction, there is a lack of research on how unfair treatment by automated computational systems is experienced by users from disadvantaged and marginalised backgrounds. There is a need for more diversification in terms of the investigated users, domains, and tasks, and regarding the strategies that users employ to reduce harm. To unpack these issues, we ran a prescreened survey of 663 participants, oversampling those with at-risk characteristics. We collected occurrences and types of conflicts regarding unfair and discriminatory treatment and systems, as well as the actions taken towards resolving these situations. Drawing on intersectional research, we combine qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to...
Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
The increasing reach and functionality of voice assistants has allowed them to become a general-p... more The increasing reach and functionality of voice assistants has allowed them to become a general-purpose platform for tasks like playing music, accessing information, and controlling smart home devices. In order to maintain the quality of third-party skills and to protect children and other members of the public from inappropriate or malicious skills, platform providers have developed content policies and certification procedures that skills must undergo prior to public release. Unfortunately, research suggests that these measures have been ineffective at curating voice assistant platforms, with documented instances of skills with significant security and privacy problems. This provocation paper outlines how the underlying architectures of these platforms had turned skill certification into a seemingly intractable problem, as well as how current certification methods fall short of their full potential. We present a roadmap for improving the state of skill certification on contemporary voice assistant platforms, including research directions and actions that need to be taken by platform vendors. Promoting this change in domestic voice assistants is especially important, as developers of commercial and industrial assistants or other similar contexts increasingly look to these devices for norms and conventions. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing design and evaluation methods; Natural language interfaces; • Security and privacy → Usability in security and privacy.
Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software ha... more Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for their otherwise hands-free voice assistant. More in line with smartphone app stores, Alexa now offers "voice-forward consent", allowing users to grant skills access to personal data mid-conversation using speech. While more usable and convenient than opening a companion app, asking for consent 'on the fly' can undermine several concepts core to the informed consent process. The intangible nature of voice interfaces further blurs the boundary between parts of an interaction controlled by third-party developers from the underlying platforms. This provocation paper highlights key issues with current verbal consent implementations, outlines directions for potential solutions, and presents five open questions to the research community. In so doing, we hope to help shape the development of usable and effective verbal consent for voice assistants and similar conversational user interfaces. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing design and evaluation methods; Natural language interfaces; • Security and privacy → Usability in security and privacy.
Personal Analytics and Privacy. An Individual and Collective Perspective, 2017
We investigate approaches to personal data analytics that involves the participation of all actor... more We investigate approaches to personal data analytics that involves the participation of all actors in our shared digital culture. We analyse their communities by identifying and clustering social relations using mobile and social media data. The work is part of our effort to develop tools to create a "social data commons", an open research environment that will share innovative tools and data sets to researchers interested in accessing the data that surrounds the production and circulation of digital culture and their actors. This experiment focuses on the groups of clustered relations that are formed within a user's social data traces. Community extraction is a popular part of the analysis of social data. We have applied the technique of Markov Clustering to the Twitter networks of social actors. Qualitatively, we demonstrate that it is more effective than the Louvain method for finding social groups known to the subjects, while still being very simple to implement. We also demonstrate that traces of cell towers captured using our "MobileMiner" mobile application are sufficient to capture significant details about their social relations by the simple application of k-means.
Our article presents a finely granulated perspective on the technical objects of datafication. We... more Our article presents a finely granulated perspective on the technical objects of datafication. We contend that such cross-disciplinary focus provides a more rigorous material grounding for a critic...
Abstract: This dissertation constructs new lines of affinity between Michel Foucault and Marxism,... more Abstract: This dissertation constructs new lines of affinity between Michel Foucault and Marxism, specifically in relation to Communication Studies. It is comprised of both a critical history of oppositional intellectuals, and a postmarxist theory of the biopolitical dynamics of capital. It examines the emergence of Michel Foucault? s later historical and philosophical work concerning the deployment of power/knowledge relations, its reception by and sources in a heterogeneous group of Italian and French post/Marxist intellectuals in the mid-to late- ...
Metadata has jumped from the specialist vernacular of the archivist and programmer to public disc... more Metadata has jumped from the specialist vernacular of the archivist and programmer to public discourse in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Yet the precise nature and import of this seemingly technical artifact remains dimly understood. This chapter will undertake a cold war archaeology of metadata, from analogue information gathered by the East German Stasi to the born digital data accessed by the NSA and GCHQ. Metadata is a key cipher for the contemporary technocultural condition, and the chapter offers a case study of broader shifts in techne (the constitutive relationship between the human and technology) and in labouring practices as afforded by our data-infused digital environment. The chapter provides a concise history of metadata as highly structured data for the information discovery of data objects. Changing surveillance practices reflect the increasingly fine granularity of the digital human to the extent that now we can be considered as data objects. The degree to whi...
If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination... more If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
Operating at a large scale and impacting large groups of people, automated systems can make con... more Operating at a large scale and impacting large groups of people, automated systems can make consequential and sometimes contestable decisions. Automated decisions can impact a range of phenomena, from credit scores to insurance payouts to health evaluations. These forms of automation can become problematic when they place certain groups or people at a systematic disadvantage. These are cases of discrimination-which is legally defined as the unfair or unequal treatment of an individual (or group) based on certain protected characteristics (also known as protected attributes) such as income, education, gender, or ethnicity. When the unfair treatment is caused by automated decisions, usually taken by intelligent agents or other AI-based systems, the topic of digital discrimination arises. Digital discrimination is prevalent in a diverse range of fields, such as in risk assessment systems for policing and credit scores [1], [2]. Digital discrimination is becoming a serious problem, as more and more decisions are delegated to systems increasingly based on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning. Although a significant amount of research has been undertaken from different disciplinary angles to understand this challenge-from computer science to law to sociology-none of these fields have been able to resolve the problem on their own terms. For instance, computational methods to verify and certify bias-free data
This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understandi... more This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing.
Why did News Corporation spend $580 million on MySpace, one of the fastest growing websites on th... more Why did News Corporation spend $580 million on MySpace, one of the fastest growing websites on the internet? Our contention is that it contains a dynamic new source of creative power: what we call ‘immaterial labour 2.0’. MySpace is where (mostly) youth ‘learn’ to expand their cultural and communicative capacities by constructing online subjectivities in an open-ended process of becoming. The labour performed therein is one of modulation and variation in the networked formations that result in an exponential expansion of discrete nodes of both affect and affinity and of potential surplus value. We present immaterial labour 2.0 as an ambivalent modality of both biopower and biopolitical production, and as an exemplar of the paradigm shift underway in our interface with popular culture, media, and information and communication technology. By recalling Dallas Smythe’s ‘audience commodity’ we contrast the ‘producibility’ of subjects in relation to broadcast media with the ‘productivity’ of immaterial labour 2.0 in social networks like MySpace
Abstract taken from the English language original (Immaterial Labour 2.0. or, Learning to Like So... more Abstract taken from the English language original (Immaterial Labour 2.0. or, Learning to Like Social Networks): "Can one already glimpse the outlines of these future forms of resistance,capable of standing up to marketing’s blandishments? Many young people have a strange craving to be ‘motivated’, they’re always asking for special courses and continuing education; it is their job to discover whose ends these serve, just as older people discovered, with considerable difficulty, who was benefiting from disciplines. A snake’s coils are even more intricate than a mole’s burrow." (Deleuze, 1995, p. 182) Facebook is undoubtedly the biggest and brightest new star of the media firmament. There are now 500 million users and counting, making it the world’s second most popular website, behind only Google. More importantly, Facebook users log an average of 60 minutes each day, by visiting the site an astounding 13 times from the time they wake up to the time they go to sleep (Facebook 2011). The superlatives of Facebook are not limited to the social and communicative realm. In early 2011, its market value was pegged at almost $83 B (TechCrunch, 2011a). Given that Facebook has only been open to the general public since the fall of 2006, it seems likely that its social, and political-economic significance will only increase in the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is our contention that social networks like Facebook are not only exemplary of what is increasingly known as the Web 2.0, they are also paradigmatic of an emergent form of 'immaterial labour'.
2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), 2015
If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination... more If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
In this article, the author uses Foucault's largely overlooked but vital concept, the disposi... more In this article, the author uses Foucault's largely overlooked but vital concept, the dispositif, in relation to the recent rise of mobility, explosion of data and proliferation of platforms and apps. With a focus on how data an individual generates increasingly moves autonomously of their control, he presents the dispositif of ‘data motility’ to develop a new materialist analysis of the digital human as a discursive and non-discursive assemblage.
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