Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

We're on the cusp of the next wave of the web, where information will come to people, versus people seeking it out. This "big reverse" of the web poses all sorts of issues: ranging from policy, to personal privacy, to standardization across devices. The creator of Drupal and co-founder and CTO of Acquia Dries Buytaert discusses what it will take to navigate a web that doesn't look or feel anything like what we know today. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/03/Buytaert

For four years running, the Director of National Intelligence’s Worldwide Threat Assessment to Congress has led with cyber threats to national and international security. Under statute, the several National Intelligence Officers constitute the most senior advisors of the US Intelligence Community in their areas of expertise. In this discussion National Intelligence Officer for Cyber Issues, Sean Kanuck, highlights the technology trends that are transforming cybersecurity and the future of intelligence. Assessing strategic developments in international relations and its implications for deterring malicious activity in cyberspace, his analysis focuses on the(in)applicability of existing arms control mechanisms and deterrence principles to modern information and communication technologies. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2016/3/Kanuck

Wikipedia, largely used as a synecdoche for open production generally, is a large, complex, distributed system that needs to solve a set of "open problems" efficiently in order to thrive. In this talk, Aaron Halfaker uses the metaphor of biology as a "living system" to discuss the relationship between subsystem efficiency and the overall health of Wikipedia. Specifically, Halfaker describes Wikipedia's quality control subsystem and some trade-offs that were made in order to make this system efficient through the introduction of subjective algorithms and human computation. Finally, he uses critiques waged by feminist HCI to argue for a new strategy for increasing the adaptive capacity of this subsystem and speaks generally about improving the practice of applying subjective algorithms in social spaces. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/02/Halfaker

How did we learn that we need to learn to code—or else? This talk draws on three years of fieldwork among Washington, D.C.’s public libraries, and interviews with librarians and homeless patrons, to explore how poverty comes to be understood as a ‘digital divide’ and how that framework changes the nature and purpose of public institutions in an era of skyrocketing inequality. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/01/Greene

Public Lab is an open community developing and using civic technologies to support the pursuance of community-defined questions and concerns. Public Lab introduces a model that incorporates open source R&D practices including transparent collaboration and iterative design, along with deliberative democratic governance, and practitioner empowerment through critical making. Community science can enable people to collect, interpret, and apply their own data to effect local change or participate in broader environmental research and decision-making. We’ve conceptualized a tiered approach to project development, delineated by the scope of community objectives and the role of science in achieving those objectives. Examples of Public Lab projects from each tier demonstrate the versatility of community science, and the potential opportunity for it to facilitate public participation in environmental decision-making on multiple levels. In this session, Shannon Dosemagen discusses how participatory online communities can strategically support hyper-local goals and help to scale the ability for replicable change in how the public engages with decision-making processes. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/01/Dosemagen

We've created a world where information technology permeates our economies, social interactions, and intimate selves. The combination of mobile, cloud computing, the Internet Things, persistent computing, and autonomy are resulting in something different. This World-Sized Web promises great benefits, but is also vulnerable to a host of new threats. Threats from users, criminals, corporations, and governments. Threats that can now result in physical damage and even death. This talk looks back at what we've learned from past attempts to secure these systems, and forward at what technologies, laws, regulations, economic incentives, and social norms we need to secure them in the future. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/02/Schneier

In 1997, as a freshly-minted lawyer, Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar joined the staff of the Treasury Department’s Office of Enforcement. Almost immediately, he was drawn into some of the fascinating issues that Treasury confronted at the time, from the regulation of electronic money to international policing and anti-corruption initiatives. In this talk, he reflected on his years at Treasury and discussed some of the connections between the challenges he encountered at Treasury then and some of the dilemmas facing the world today. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/01/Cuellar

Hate shopping? The next generation of e-commerce will be conducted by digital agents, based on algorithms that will not only make purchase recommendations, but will also predict what we want, make purchase decisions, negotiate and execute the transaction for the consumers, and even automatically form coalitions of buyers to enjoy better terms, thereby replacing human decision-making. Algorithmic consumers have the potential to change dramatically the way we conduct business, raising new conceptual and regulatory challenges. This game-changing technological development has significant implications for regulation, which should be adjusted to a reality of consumers making their purchase decisions via algorithms. Despite this challenge, scholarship addressing commercial algorithms focused primarily on the use of algorithms by suppliers. In this presentation Michal Gal and Niva Elkin-Koren explore the technological advances which are shaping algorithmic consumers, and analyze how these advances affect the competitive dynamic in the market. They analyze the implications of such technological advances on regulation, identifying three main challenges. They further discuss some of the challenges to human autonomous choice that arise from these developments, and examine whether the existing legal framework is adequate to address them. For more on this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/04/AlgorithmicConsumers

Mobile phone data is passively collected in real-time by operators, producing enormous data sets that can be used to map human populations and migration accurately. These data hold enormous promise for infectious disease control and other public health interventions, as well as for response to emergencies. However, the privacy implications and complex political and regulatory environment surrounding their use have yet to be addressed systematically. In this talk Dr. Caroline Buckee discusses her work to use these records to model and forecast disease outbreaks, as well as the potential pitfalls and ethical issues associated with the increasingly routine use of these data in the public realm. About Dr. Buckee Dr. Caroline Buckee joined Harvard School of Public Health in the summer of 2010 as an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology. In 2013, Dr. Buckee was named the Associate Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. Her focus is on elucidating the mechanisms driving the dynamics and evolution of the malaria parasite and other genetically diverse pathogens. After receiving a D.Phil from the University of Oxford, Caroline worked at the Kenya Medical Research Institute to analyze clinical and epidemiological aspects of malaria as a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow. Her work led to an Omidyar Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute, where she developed theoretical approaches to understanding malaria parasite evolution and ecology. Dr. Buckee’s work at Harvard extends these approaches using mathematical models to bridge the biological scales underlying malaria epidemiology; she works with experimental researchers to understand the molecular mechanisms within the host that underlie disease and infection, and uses genomic and mobile phone data to link these individual-level processes to understand population level patterns of transmission. Her work has appeared in high profile scientific journals such as Science and PNAS, as well as being featured in the popular press, including CNN, The New Scientist, Voice of America, NPR, and ABC. For more about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/digitalhealth/2017/03/Buckee

The social nature of today’s Internet is creating new public health and policy challenges. For example, the US in 2014 experienced the largest measles outbreak in nearly a generation, which led to the passing of the nation’s most conservative vaccine legislation, eliminating the personal belief exemption in California. Research has identified online misinformation about vaccines […]

Following the 2014 Google Spain decision rendered by the European Court of Justice of the European Union, search engines – and, first among them, Google – are tasked with the delisting of search results leading to outdated or inaccurate information about European citizens. This ‘right to be delisted’ has since then revealed itself as a […]

With Internet censorship and mass surveillance on the rise globally, understanding regulatory “chilling effects” — the idea that laws, regulations, or state surveillance can deter people from exercising their freedoms or engaging in entirely legal activities — has thus today, in our Post-Snowden world, taken on greater urgency and public importance. In this talk, Jon […]

In this talk, Alan Weinberger — founder of The ASCII Group, Inc. and Harvard Law School alum — addresses the development of the information technology marketplace over the past three decades and the continued importance of small IT companies. Download the MP3 …or download the OGG audio format! More on this event here

In this talk Dr. Nettrice Gaskins — author and STEAM Lab Director at Boston Arts Academy — discusses her model for ‘techno-vernacular’ creative production as an area of practice that investigates the characteristics of this production and its application in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) learning. Her research consists of a study involving workshops […]

What questions are dominating the student privacy and educational technologies (“ed tech”) landscape? In this conversation the Berkman Center’s Student Privacy Initiative team does a deep dive into the 1.0 and 2.0 privacy conversations: The 1.0 strand of inquiry has examined privacy concerns related to the interactions between governmental entities (K-12 public schools) and third-party […]