UC Berkeley School of Information

Everything we do online leaves traces: our tweets, Facebook likes, and YouTube views. Currently, Big Data is all about sifting through cloud stores of these traces with little question as to why those traces exist. Big Data analyses are based on data that are already collected; they are not about asking what should be collected to answer important social and motivational questions. I ask: What motivates people to do what they do? And how can we build predictive models of what people do based on their contextualized and emerging interests, and not just their numerical data. Finding the reasons why people do what they do, and why they create the data trails in the first place, invites a new set of questions and demands a new set of methods. I present investigations into uncovering and understanding these motivations through three areas of inquiry: genre classification, topic prediction, and event detection. I propose changes for how we measure engagement, how we design system instrumentation, and how we design for data collection, aggregation and summarization. These changes have immediate implications on how we understand human behavior online and build new experiences, and they bring ramifications for the next generation of large data solutions.

There is a great realignment happening that is changing the way the world sees itself. This realignment is the product of economic globalization, amazing advances in technology and the end of a monistic media age. The world has, for a generation, been dominated by massive Western media companies who control the most influential media: television. In the coming years, television will realign alongside social media to a pluralistic world media culture within which many new narratives will vie for our attention. Whenever media evolves so does society. There are major challenges ahead for the simplistic binary narratives spun by television, good vs. evil, black vs. white, red vs. blue, right vs. wrong. Humanity is more complex that that, and we will be confronting that complexity head-on from now on.

A global struggle for control of the Internet is now underway. At stake are no less than civil liberties, privacy, and even the character of democracy in the 21st century. Many commentators have debated whether the Internet is ultimately a force for freedom of expression and political liberation, or for alienation, and repression. Rebecca MacKinnon, author of the new book Consent of the Networked, moves the debate about the Internet’s political impact to a new level. It is time, she says, to stop arguing over whether the Internet empowers individuals and societies, and address the more fundamental and urgent question of how technology should be structured and governed to support the rights and liberties of all the world’s Internet users. Drawing upon two decades of experience as an international journalist, co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, Chinese Internet censorship expert, and Internet freedom activist, MacKinnon offers a framework for concerned citizens to understand the complex and often hidden power dynamics amongst governments, corporations, and citizens in cyberspace. She warns that a convergence of unchecked government actions and unaccountable company practices threatens the future of democracy and human rights around the world. Our freedom in the Internet age depends on whether we defend our rights on digital platforms and networks in the same way that people fight for their rights and accountable governance in physical communities and nations, claims MacKinnon. It is time to stop thinking of ourselves as passive “users” of technology and instead act like citizens of the Internet — as netizens — and take ownership and responsibility for our digital future.

Scientific computation is emerging as absolutely central to the scientific method, but the prevalence of very relaxed practices is leading to a credibility crisis affecting many scientific fields. It is impossible to verify most of the results that computational scientists present at conferences and in papers today. Reproducible computational research, in which all details of computations — code and data — are made conveniently available to others, is necessary for a resolution of this crisis. This requires a multifaceted approach including policy solutions, computational tools for data and code dissemination, curation and archiving, and open licensing frameworks such as the Reproducible Research Standard.

Howard Rheingold offers a glimpse of the future of high-end online learning in which motivated self-learners collaborate via a variety of social media to create, deliver, and learn an agreed curriculum: a mutant variety of pedagogy that more closely resembles a peer-agogy. Rheingold proposes that our intention should be to teach ourselves how to teach ourselves online, and to share what we learn. He will show how the use of social media in courses he has taught about social media issues led him to co-redesign his curriculum, which led to more active participation by students in co-teaching the course.

We used to know how to know things. That’s how we guided our businesses, our government, our daily lives. But now there is so much to know and so much conflicting advice to listen to. It seems like everyone’s an expert, and no one agrees with anyone else. This looks like a problem, but it actually can be a source of tremendous strength. It turns out that our old system of knowledge was based around the limitations of paper, a disconnected, expensive medium that managed a world that was too big to know by cutting down on what we had to deal with. There were of course advantages to that, but they came at the cost of throwing out most of what the world was trying to tell us. In the new knowledge ecology, knowledge takes on the properties of its new medium, the Net. That means knowledge has become huge, it's connected, and it embraces disagreement and differences. The key is to think about knowledge not as a set of content but as a network: the smartest person in the room is now the room itself. Then the question is, how can you build, maintain, and nurture a smart network?

What does it mean to think about culture and community before one thinks about technology? And how could that paradigm shift allow scholars and professionals to re-imagine solutions that think past net delusions around grassroots political movements, and empower community decision-making in the developing world, indigenous knowledge around climate change or cultural heritage, and communication between states and citizens? This talk takes us to several places where I have focused my fieldwork on technology and culture, and community-driven design, including Egypt's Tahrir Square, the Zuni Nation of New Mexico, the Kyrgyz Steppe, and Rural India. Across these projects, I argue for the power of thinking of both culture and technology as dynamic, and mutually co-constructed, introducing design, fieldwork, and research approaches toward the study of global media and information.

Lada Adamic is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information and an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. She is also affiliated with EECS. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure. Her projects have included identifying expertise in online question and answer forums, studying the dynamics of viral marketing, and characterizing the structure in blogs and other online communities. She has received an NSF CAREER award, and best paper awards from Hypertext'08, ICWSM'10 and '11, and the most influential paper of the decade award from Web Intelligence'11.

In this talk new media scholar Rhonda McEwen examines the context for the emergence of social media and explores the subject beyond superficial understandings of software use, to engage in debates regarding the consequences of these media for our sociality. She will begin with a reflection on a timeline representing the rise of social media, then shares research findings from four of her new media projects — as well as drawing on current affairs — to describe the roles of Facebook, SMS, Skype, Blogs, LinkedIn, and Twitter in the areas of transitions, design, critique, and praxis.

Technology is no longer the limiting factor, so what should we do? More than just rejecting the industrial model of learning, we need to think further. We can draw on different models of cognition and learning, and emerging technology capabilities, to propose new approaches to achieving our goals. We need to look for outside inspirations for rethinking what education might mean. Our reach should transcend learning and look to truly transformative experiences. Come explore the possibilities and co-create the future of learning design.

More than a year after the Google Book Settlement fairness hearing, Judge Chin ruled that the settlement was not fair and could not be approved. In this talk, Pam Samuelson explains why she thinks the failure of this settlement was inevitable. It will also discuss the options available after the failure of the settlement and why some of these options are more likely or desirable than others.

The past decade has seen great interest in information and communication technologies applied to international development, an endeavor sometimes abbreviated ICTD. Can mobile phones be used to improve rural healthcare? How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? What value is wireless technology to a farmer earning a dollar a day? In this panel, four prominent thinkers active in ICTD debate the potential for electronic technologies to contribute to the socio-economic development of the world’s impoverished communities. Eric Brewer is a UC Berkeley professor who develops wireless technologies to connect rural communities. Megan Smith is vice president of new business development at Google and managing director of Google.org. Kentaro Toyama is co-founder of Microsoft Research India, and a computer scientist turned technology skeptic. Wayan Vota is a senior director at Inveneo, a non-profit that works to provide information technology to underserved communities of the developing world.

Health care reform and the recent economic downturn are placing unprecedented pressure on the health care system to provide consumers with value. Patients, purchasers, regulators, and other key stakeholders are demanding that care be readily accessible, proactive, and focused on improving health while containing costs. Many in the health care system are developing novel strategies to provide these services including new delivery models centered on patient-centricity, health information technology, and integrated delivery systems. The lecture will discuss how these forces interact as well as the challenges and opportunities they afford in improving the U.S. health care system.

The last decade has seen the organic growth of the web as a platform, enabling near-frictionless community-building, social communication, and collective action. But the institutions citizens support to represent our collective will and achieve our common goals have been left behind, largely by their own design. Today, several factors are converging to make re-crafting of government possible, and a key ingredient are the very hackers and designers who see the enormous opportunity to build a “citizen Internet.”

Traditional businesses follow a simple formula: create a product or service, sell it, collect money. But in the last few years a fundamentally different model has taken root — one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more peer-to-peer power. Pioneering entrepreneur Lisa Gansky calls it the Mesh and reveals why it will soon dominate the future of business. Mesh companies create, share and use social media, wireless networks, and data crunched from every available source to provide people with goods and services at the exact moment they need them, without the burden and expense of owning them outright. Gansky reveals how there is real money to be made and trusted brands and strong communities to be built in helping your customers buy less but use more.