CITP

According to the US National Security Agency, we’re living in the “golden age” of signals intelligence—the spying on worldwide communications of all kinds. The Snowden documents, now in the public eye for about a decade, revealed a surveillance apparatus of extraordinary breadth and depth. Yet, for all their lurid fascination, their confirmation of some tinfoil hat theories, their illustration of compliance regimes, the documents reveal little about how we came to build this apparatus. They tell little of the surprisingly broad bipartisan consensus, from the mid-1990s onward, supporting the vast expansion of domestic and international surveillance and dramatic alterations in the law around wiretapping and hacking, in the US as well as its close partners.

9/11 accelerated these shifts. It did not cause them. From the war on drugs of the 1980s, to beginnings of the focus on terrorism as the new primary enemy from the mid 1990s, electronic surveillance came to appear ever more essential and licit to spies, presidents, legislators and judges. This talk will trace the technological and legal developments, as well as the radical rethinking  of the security of the “homeland,” making this all possible. In the wake of 9/11, these contested developments were made to appear at once technologically determined and essential for security in an asymmetric age.

Bio: Matthew L. Jones is the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University. He focuses on the history of recent information technologies and intelligence as well as the history of science and technology in early modern Europe. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard (1994, 2000) and an M.Phil. from Cambridge, after which he taught at Columbia for twenty-three years.

Along with Chris Wiggins, he is the author of How Data Happened, a history of the science, politics, and power of data, statistics, and machine learning from the 1800s to the present (W. W. Norton, 2023). He has published two books previously, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue and Reckoning with Matter: Calculating, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (both with Chicago). He has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, and is currently a CIFAR fellow in the Future Flourishing project.

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In-person attendance is restricted to Princeton University faculty, staff and students.

Members of the public can join the Zoom.

If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.

After increasing rapidly over seven years, the number of active contributors to English Wikipedia peaked in 2007 and has been in decline since. A body of evidence will be presented that suggests English Wikipedia’s pattern of growth and decline appears to be a general feature of “peer production”—the model of collaborative production that has produced millions of wikis, free/open source software projects, websites like OpenStreetMap, and more.

It will be argued that this pattern of growth, maturity, and decline is not caused by newcomers who have stopped showing up, but rather because communities have become less open to the newcomers who do arrive. A theoretical model and a range of empirical evidence will be provided that suggests why this surprising dynamic may be a rational approach to the shifting governance challenges faced by digital knowledge commons.

Bio: Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist and technologist. In both roles, he works to understand the social dynamics that shape online communities. His work focuses on communities engaged in the peer production of digital public goods—like Wikipedia and Linux. He is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and a founding member of the Community Data Science Collective. He is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He has also been an activist, developer, contributor, and leader in the free and open source software and free culture movements for more than two decades as part of the Debian, Ubuntu, and Wikimedia projects.

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In-person attendance is restricted to Princeton University faculty, staff and students. This talk is open to the public via Zoom.

This talk will be recorded and posted to the CITP website, YouTube channel and to Media Central.

If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.

In her research, Liaqat asks how we can reimagine the role of technology in fostering social knowledge-sharing experiences. To this end, she designs social computing technologies to help people create, collaborate, and connect. This talk will provide an overview of these three dimensions of Liaqat’s work. She will discuss these dimensions in the context of two of her projects, which includes Capybara, a decentralized, mobile augmented reality app to support young people in creating with augmented reality and StoryTapestry, a web-based visual storytelling app to support culture and language sharing between immigrant grandparents and grandchildren.

The talk will discuss what it means to create, how users have diverse goals when creating (e.g. learning,  having fun, social connection etc.), and how we can design to support these goals. Liaqat will talk about how collaboration can trigger complex social dynamics, mediated by users’ various backgrounds, relationships to each other, and their goals. Specifically, she will share the unique ways in which she has observed users collaborate to create joint meaning in their digital artifacts.

Finally, the talk will cover what it means to have a meaningful social connection, and the role of technology in mediating these connections. Liaqat will conclude by touching on the mixed mixed-methods methodological approaches she has employed in her studies, how she has adapted them for each population she works with, and what these approaches can teach researchers about engaging with users in richer and more nuanced ways.

Bio: Amna Liaqat was a postdoctoral research fellow with CITP for the 2022-23 academic year, and she is spending the next two years at CITP as the recipient of Princeton University’s Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow Award.

Liaqat’s research lies at the intersection of human computer interaction (HCI) and education. She designs tools for lifelong learning, with a focus on supporting collaborative processes, knowledge-sharing, and learning tacit skills. Liaqat holds a Ph.D. and a Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Toronto, and a Bachelor’s degree in business and computer science from Simon Fraser University. In her graduate research, she developed tools to support culture and language learning for immigrants in Canada.

The common theme across Liaqat’s research is the idea that technology-mediated support can enrich the knowledge sharing and production process. She also develops novel frameworks, human-centered design approaches, and mixed-methods that challenge historical techno-determinist approaches to designing for marginalized populations. In her projects, Liaqat draws on her interdisciplinary training to engage end-to-end in the technology creation process, from requirements gathering, development, deployment, and evaluation. This approach reveals hidden dynamics and results in nuanced technology design requirements for the multifaceted sociotechnical ecosystems she designs for.

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In person attendance is open to Princeton University faculty, staff and students. Those with a Princeton University email address can join the livestream.

This talk will not be recorded.

If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.

Webinar link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/93934120723

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Dozens of policy proposals and interventions have attempted to address actual and potential cases of algorithmic bias, particularly in systems that have consequential effects on people’s lives. While these proposals commonly include mandates for proactive measurement to detect such biases, they rarely specify how to accomplish what must come next: preventing or rectifying the observed fairness gaps. Technical researchers have made some progress toward the development of theoretical approaches to mitigating algorithmic bias, but these methods have tended to be misaligned with policy expectations, be inapplicable or insufficiently effective in critical circumstances where fairness mitigation is likely to be expected or required, and fail to grapple with practical constraints.

This talk will delve into key tensions and open questions that emerge when attempting to mitigate algorithmic bias, exploring the complex interplay between legal, technical, and policy realities that will need to be resolved in order to effectively tackle algorithmic bias.

Bio: Miranda Bogen is the founding director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Building on CDT’s decades of leadership fighting to advance civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age, the Lab provides public interest expertise in rapidly developing policy and technical conversations around artificial intelligence, advancing the interests of individuals whose lives and rights are impacted by AI.

An AI policy expert and responsible AI practitioner, Miranda has led work at the intersection of policy and AI fairness and governance in senior roles in industry and civil society. She served as co-chair of the Fairness, Transparency, and Accountability Working Group at the Partnership on AI, conducted foundational research at the intersection of machine learning and civil rights at Upturn, and most recently guided strategy and implementation of responsible AI practices at Meta. Bogen co-authored widely cited research on the potential for discrimination in personalized advertising and the role of artificial intelligence in the hiring process, and her work has informed international policy discussions on the civil and human rights implications of artificial intelligence, including citations in the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Bogen’s writing and analysis has appeared in publications including the Harvard Business Review, NPR, Slate, and Newsweek, and her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist, Reuters, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Last Week Tonight, and more.

Bogen holds a Masters from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University with a focus on international technology policy, and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA with degrees in Political Science and Middle Eastern & North African Studies.

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This talk will be recorded and posted to the CITP website, YouTube channel and Media Central.

Algorithm audits are powerful tools for studying black-box systems without direct knowledge of those systems’ inner workings. While they have been effectively deployed to identify harms and biases in algorithmic content, algorithm audits’ narrow focus on technical components stop short of considering users themselves as integral and dynamic parts of the system, to be audited alongside its algorithmic components.

After an overview of the state of the art in algorithm auditing, this talk will introduce sociotechnical auditing: evaluating algorithmic systems at the sociotechnical level, focusing on the interplay between algorithms and users as each impacts the other over time. Metaxa will also present Intervenr, a platform developed to conduct browser-based, longitudinal sociotechnical audits, and a case study in which we deployed Intervenr to investigate the central claim of online targeted advertising systems: that targeted ads perform better with users. Finally, the talk will conclude by discussing some of the group’s current work, expanding the auditing method to novices and youth, and developing post-auditing tools for collective action.

Bio: Danaë Metaxa is the Raj and Neera Singh Term Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. Metaxa specializes in issues of bias and representation in algorithmic systems and content, across high-stakes social settings including politics, employment, and education. Most recently, their work has focused on online ad targeting, including its effectiveness and its impact on marginalized populations. Their work has been published and awarded in top-tier publication venues including the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). They have also worked in an advisory role with legal, industry, and policy groups including  the NYC Commission on Human Rights, Halt AI, and PolicyLink. Prior to Penn, Metaxa received their Ph.D. from Stanford University in computer science.

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Attendance at CITP seminars is open to Princeton University faculty, staff and students. Members of the Princeton University community may join the Zoom meeting.

This talk will be recorded and posted to the CITP website, the CITP YouTube channel and the Princeton University Media Central channel.

If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.

The capacities of LLM-powered chatbots have been progressing on the order of months and have recently passed into mainstream public awareness and adoption. These tools have been used for a variety of scientific and policy interventions, but these advances call for a significant re-thinking of their place in society. Psychological research suggests that "intentionality" is a key factor in persuasion and social norm enforcement, and the proliferation of LLMs represents a significant shock to the "intentionality" contained in text and particularly in immediate, personalized chat. This talk argues that we are in a period of "informational disequilibrium," where different actors have different levels of awareness of this technological shock. This period may thus represent a golden age for actors aiming to use these technologies at scale, for any number of normative ends. More broadly, the talk suggests that the "ethical" frameworks for evaluating research practices using LLM-powered chatbots are insufficient to the scale of the current challenge. This is a potentially revolutionary technology that requires thinking in moral and political terms: given the power imbalances involved, it is of paramount importance that chatbots for good do not inadvertently become chatbots for evil.

Bio: Kevin Munger is the Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor of Political Science and assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University. Kevin’s research focuses on the implications of the internet and social media for the communication of political information. His specialty is the investigation of the economics of online media; current research models “clickbait media” and uses digital experiments to test the implications of these models on consumers of political information.

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Attendance at CITP seminars is open to Princeton University faculty, staff and students.
Link to join Webinar: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/91036100191
This seminar will be recorded and posted to the CITP website, the CITP YouTube channel and the Princeton University Media Central channel.
If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.

Social media are increasingly important for discussing a myriad of topics, including science and religion. While there is some work about social media use for the topics of science and religion, little of this scholarship has nuanced measures about people’s experiences. In this talk, results will be presented from a survey administered to a representative sample of over 2,500 American adults in 2023 about why they avoid discussions about such topics. In addition to general trends, the talk will consider how religiosity and science literacy relate to whether people avoid such conversations on social media.

Bio: Eszter Hargittai is a professor and holds the Chair of Internet Use and Society at the Department of Communication and Media Research of the University of Zurich. In Fall, 2023, she is William Allan Neilson Professor at Smith College. She is a past fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. National Science Foundation, Google, Microsoft Research, Facebook, Nokia and Merck, among others. Her work has received awards from several professional associations and for her teaching, she received the Galbut Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award of the School of Communication at Northwestern University.

Hargittai is a fellow of the International Communication Association and an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her book Connected in Isolation (The MIT Press, 2022) looks at digital inequality during the Covid pandemic. She has edited four books, most recently, the Handbook of Digital Inequality (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021). Hargittai holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University and a B.A. in sociology from Smith College.

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Attendance at CITP seminars is open to Princeton University faculty, staff and students. Members of the University community may join via Zoom with their University login.

This seminar will be recorded and posted to the CITP website, the CITP YouTube channel and the Princeton University Media Central channel.

If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.

 

Workers everywhere are more surveilled, managed, and quantified by technology than ever before, harming people’s health, safety, and dignity at work. Gig workers like Uber and Lyft drivers are at the mercy of these firms’ latest changes to their algorithms and platforms. While pundits worry about generative AI replacing creative jobs, white-collar workers experience increasingly draconian forms of workplace surveillance and algorithmic scoring. Warehouse workers suffer serious workplace safety violations due to algorithmically-backed “nudges”. Yet, the bulk of data protection and AI regulation in the US and EU either excludes workers entirely or fundamentally fails to meet worker needs. Why is this the case, and what do workers in the US and EU need from data and AI regulation?

This talk argues that current regulatory frameworks focus too much on the rights of and harms to individual ‘data subjects’. This focus ignores the main reason why workers seek data access and protection in the first place: to collectively exert greater agency and control over their work. In lieu of comprehensive regulation, workers use existing laws and technologies to put pressure on companies and leverage the data they produce at work. Calacci will  share what they see as the forefront of this movement, including ongoing projects from their own research, and the challenges and opportunities ahead in policymaking and technology design for the future of labor.

Bio: Dan Calacci is a postdoctoral research associate at CITP. Calacci studies the technical, social, and legal implications of data and AI on communities and workers. They are passionate about designing technologies with workers and community members that help answer their most pressing questions about the impact of AI, new platforms, and surveillance on their lives. Calacci received their Ph.D. from MIT’s Media Lab in 2023, and a B.S. in computer science from Northeastern University in 2015. Calacci also has experience as a startup co-founder and a mixed-media artist. Their writing and work has appeared or been featured in NPR’s Radiolab, Gizmodo, Wired, Reuters, The Atlantic’s CityLab, the New York Times, and other major publications.

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Attendance at CITP seminars is open to Princeton University faculty, staff and students.

This seminar will be recorded and posted to the CITP website, the CITP YouTube channel and the Princeton University Media Central channel.

If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.

CITP and Stanford University’s Center for Research on Foundation Models are collaborating to present a virtual workshop on Responsible and Open Foundation Models. 

In the last year, open foundation models have proliferated widely. Given the rapid adoption of these models, cultivating a responsible open source AI ecosystem is crucial and urgent. Our workshop presents an opportunity to learn from experts in different fields who have worked on responsible release strategies, risk mitigation, and policy interventions that can help.

The event will feature conversations with experts who have:

• Worked in computer science and tech policy on responsible release practices for open foundation models
• Developed and deployed best practices for open source software in past waves of free and open-source software
• Implemented and developed tech policy for responsible technology use.

Please visit the Responsible and Open Foundation Models workshop website for details.
For additional information please contact Sayash Kapoor at sayashk@princeton.edu.

Digital Witness Lab is a research initiative that collects data to expose surveillance, misinformation, and other harms on digital platforms. We build independent, public, and open-source resources to scrutinize data-driven technologies so we can demand accountability for their harms. In this talk, our flagship project, WhatsApp Watch will be discussed  and it will be explained how our approach to tech accountability research is informed by a over a decade of experience working in newsrooms and research contexts.

More general information about the lab and our research focus areas will be provided  as well as potential opportunities for students to get involved in our work.

Bio: Surya Mattu is an award-winning Brooklyn based data journalist, artist and engineer. He builds digital witness tools to investigate algorithmic systems and the ways in which they perpetuate biases and inequalities in society. Mattu leads the Digital Witness Lab at CITP, where he oversees the WhatsApp Watch project.

At the investigative journalism site, The Markup, he created Blacklight, a real-time website privacy inspector, and led Citizen Browser, a first of its kind independent audit of Facebook’s recommendation algorithms. Mattu’s work at The Markup has received public recognition, including two Edward R. Murrow awards and an award from the National Association of Black Journalists. He is also a 2021 University of Michigan Knight Wallace fellow.

Previously, he was a contributing researcher at ProPublica, where he worked on Machine Bias, a series that aims to highlight how algorithmic systems can be biased and discriminate against people. Machine Bias was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Explanatory Journalism. His work has been exhibited at Somerset House, The Haus der Kulturen der Welt , The Whitney Museum, V&A Museum and Bitforms Gallery.

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Attendance at CITP seminars is open to Princeton University faculty, staff and students. Members of the University community may join via Zoom with their University login.

This seminar will be recorded and posted to the CITP website, the CITP YouTube channel and the Princeton University Media Central channel.

If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.