Category: Uncategorized

Today I finished reading this very intesting book on the effects of policy-algorithms on vulnerable people and social justice.

A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination—and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity

The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

From January 2019 I’ll be the new coordinator for the Interaction Design program at Stockholm University. I’m very excited about this new adventure and the possibility to improve education.

CHI reviews were out last week and, as usual, they were the topic of extended dicussion until rebuttals were submitted. My reviews were quite split, and I had the bitter feeling I had submitted my article to the wrong sub-committe. Actually I almost felt stupid about it, stupid for spending a lot of effort on a piece of work and then giving it to people who obviously work with different topics – yes, always check out the names on the list, even if that commiittee has alwys been your confort zone. Writing the rebuttal was good to answer to what I felt were misunderstandings of my work and of reflective essays more in general. But it isn’t those misunderstandings I’m still annoyed about, not at all. It is R2’s tone (for real this time) that still bugs me. The review was really unpleasant in every single point raised, and it culminated with something that read like: “in fact one of the major weaknesses of this paper is the language and the many errors and typos”. This point was brought up, almost verbatim, by the AC. Now, I know my English is not perfect, but I also know it’s not broken and I’m sure it has never been a MAIN weakness of my writing. So in a growing, international, scientific community that only speaks English, why can’t we find a nice way to say that a certain paper needs (careful) proofreading? Why aren’t ACs more sensitive towards these issues?  Can these issues be pointed out in a rebuttal without compromising your work, once and for all? Why aren’t expert and novice external reviewers asked to be kind with their collegagues?

Airi Lampinen and myself were awarded the David Martin best paper award for our paper “Co-Creating the Workplace: Participatory Efforts to Enable Individual Work at the Hoffice” presented at ECSCW 2018.

Last Sunday I got back from Denver where I attended CHI 2017. As usual if was fun, exciting and overwhelming to be among 3000 attendees for almost a week.

My conference schedule started on Saturday with our workshop on Design Fiction for Mixed-Reality Performance, a collaboration with a bunch of interesting folks from The Mixed Reality Lab (Nottingham University), Open Lab (Newcastle University), The University of York, the University of Glasgow and, of course, my colleagues from DSV/SU. The workshop was inspiring as we played with crazy ideas of performative interactions, and addressed ethical issues emerging from introducing novel technologies into interactive performances. Something interesting we did, was to play with the whole idea of fictions by telling small lies about our respective research. I must say this wasn’t easy, but it was a playful way to push the limits of what we do and to discuss dreams and concerns about future research.

On Wednesday afternoon it was time to present my own paper Interactive Performance as a Means of Social Dialogue, coauthored with Maria Normark and Louise Barkhuus. Realising I was supposed to present in the plenary ball room made me really stressed because of the rock-concert feeling the stage had. But the talk went very well, and I’m really pleased about it. The paper has been awarded an honourable mention which means that it is among the 5% best papers at the whole conference which had a total of 2400 submissions.  It presents the study of the performance Haimon (directed by Rebecca Forsberg, Rats Theater) and it draws attention to the aesthetical and political qualities emerging from participating in it. Drawing on the tension between these two qualities, the work illustrates the transition from being audience members to being engaged citizens and how this becomes the essence of a civic dialogue on socio-political concerns. Overall, a contribution to the growing CHI discourse on Digital Civics and Civic Technologies.

As usual, I came back from CHI with a lot of energy, new ideas (too many maybe) and ready for more writing.

Yesterday I received an email notification that our workshop proposal to ECSCW 2017 has been accepted. I’m looking foward to this workshop as it willbe an opportunity to revisit and explores ideas and research  interests developed during my PhD in light of recent socio-technical developments.
The workshop is a collaboration with old and new colleagues I really enjoy working with, and it will take me back to ECSCW after several years of absence.

Abstract

This workshop is relevant to ECSCW 2017 as it will provide a context to revisit past and current research on mobility and nomadic practices that has traditionally been core in the community. As such, it will be an opportunity to highlight how this area of research has contributed to the CSCW community, but also to identify unsolved problems, future challenges and research agendas. We see the in-depth discussion that we hope to generate as an opportunity to connect research on nomadic practices to more recent research on sharing platforms as sites of work. This will contribute to develop an understanding of nomadic culture by providing a more contemporary perspective on the social and cultural aspects around workplace sites and co-working practices.

More about the workshop

Organizers

Luigina Ciolfi is Reader in Communication in the Communication and Computing Research Centre, C3RI, Sheffield Hallam University (UK). She holds a Laurea (Univ. of Siena, Italy) and a PhD (Univ. of Limerick, Ireland) in Human-Computer Interaction. Her main research interests are on people’s experience of technology in the physical world, nomadic work and life practices, cultural heritage technologies and collaboration and participation in design. She has worked on several research projects exploring interaction with technology in public spaces, heritage settings, and practices of work and life on the move. She is interested in further exploring placemaking and mechanisms of mobilisation of work and non-work activities. She has organised numerous international workshops and has published on these topics in refereed conferences and journals.
Breda Gray is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Limerick. She holds a B. Soc. Sc. (University College Dublin, Ireland); BSW (University of British Columbia, Canada), MA Management Learning and PhD Sociology, Lancaster University UK. She is Co-Convenor of Gender ARC research consortium between the University of Limerick and National University of Ireland Galway. Her central research interests are in gender, migration, mobilities, changing work patterns and governance. She has published widely on these themes as well as leading and advising on related international and national research projects.
Airi Lampinen is a researcher and lecturer at Mobile Life Centre at Stockholm University, Sweden. Over the past decade, her research has focused on social and economic activities in networked settings, ranging from network hospitality and peer-to-peer exchange in local communities to on-demand service platforms and social media. Lampinen holds a PhD in social psychology from University of Helsinki and a BSc (Eng.) from Aalto University’s interdisciplinary Information Networks degree programme. Previously, she has been a researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a research intern at Microsoft Research New England.
Fabiano Pinatti is an Associate Researcher at the Institute of Information Systems and New Media of the University of Siegen. He holds a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Federal University of São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil, and a Multidisciplinary PhD developed within a joint project between the Interaction Design Centre of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Ireland, and the Department of Sociology at the same university. His interests span Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing, Mobile and Nomadic Work and Informatics in Education and the focus of his research is on technologically-mediated human practices. He has published several articles on topics related to these fields of research in prestigious international conferences. During his doctoral research he has investigated issues of nomadic work/life practices in the knowledge economy, providing a more nuanced account of nomadicity and associated issues.
Chiara Rossitto is a lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction at Stockholm University. She holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), and a Masters Degree in Communication Science from the University of Siena (Italy). Her research is characterized by a combination of social theory and empirical investigations of technologies use. Her previous work has focused in the methodological and analytical challenges inherent in studying nomadicity in collaborative work. She has also investigated place-making practices and how they can emerge from the interactions between people, their activities, and their efforts to manage and use constellations of technologies. She is interested in outlining a research agenda exploring an ecological understanding of contemporary nomadic practices.