Publications

The functionality of the Internet and the Web are determined in large part by the design of technical standards that allow for interoperable implementations. Those design decisions are important both in terms of functionality and in maintaining basic public policy values including accessibility, freedom of expression, privacy and security. This is one instance of a phenomenon variously…

In 1950 Robert L. Gitler went to Japan to found the first college-level school of library science in that country. His mission, an improbable success, was documented in an assisted autobiography as Robert Gitler and the Japan Library School (Scarecrow Press, 1999). Subsequent research into initiatives to improve library services during the Allied occupation has revealed surprising…

This dissertation investigates social biosensing: the sharing of physiological information between people, particularly through the lens of empathy and related interpersonal psychological processes. Self-tracking is the the collection and sharing of physiological information about oneself and has been a focus in academic research, but a next step in the use of this data, particularly…

The standard response to concerns about “black box” algorithms is to make those algorithms transparent or explainable. Explainability is an additional design goal for machine-learning systems. Driven in part by growing recognition of the limits of transparency to foster human understanding of algorithmic systems, and in part by pursuit of other goals such as safety and human compatibility,…

Enhancing machine capabilities to answer questions has been a topic of considerable focus in recent years of NLP research. Language models like Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo)[1] and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) [2] have been very successful in developing general purpose language models that can be optimized for a large number of downstream language…

The need for electronic health records to be transferred between institutions is large and growing.  Ensuring smooth and accurate identification of patients is a privacy problem endemic to data storage in all fields.  The field of data science must design and implement best practices in data stewardship, to ensure that security breaches do not under mine data privacy.

Recognizing the prevalence of initiatives to align technology with social values through design and “by design” (such as privacy by design, security by design, and governance by design), this dissertation explores the current and potential role of design techniques in attending to values, and analyzes user experience (UX) professionals’ “values work” practices—practices used to surface,…

Intelligence has been defined in many ways like logic, awareness, reasoning, critical thinking, etc. Many researchers insist on the possibility of a Technological Singularity shortly, which may see machines gaining intelligence similar to, or greater than humans. While many researchers believe that Technological Singularity is at an arm’s length, many counter-question the possibility of the…

How many steps did you take today? Counting steps may seem like a clear-cut number, but this number is embroiled in bigger goals around health, broadly conceived, how we feel about our bodies, behavior, and lifestyle. We engage these issues on a personal level while also influenced by social relationships and societal narratives. Technologies such as step-counters influence what “counts”, or…

Migrants play a central role in the economy and society of most developing countries and are primary drivers of economic mobility among poor and rural households. The decision to migrate is one of the most important economic decisions an individual can make. On the one hand, social networks play a crucial role in influencing people's migration decision. On the other hand, as migrants adapt to…

This paper introduces "infrastructural speculations," an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds…

Significant resources have been directed towards K-12 computing and data education over the past ten years, as part of what has come to be known as the CSforAll initiative. This initiative has focused on raising awareness of computing education among parents and students, developing situated learning progressions that resonate with many different interests and pursuits, training teachers, and…

The explosion in the use of software in important sociotechnical systems has renewed focus on the study of the way technical constructs reflect policies, norms, and human values. This effort requires the engagement of scholars and practitioners from many disciplines. And yet, these disciplines often conceptualize the operative values very differently while referring to them using the same…

A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences.

In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why — despite its failures — the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and…