The Partnership Press: Lessons for Platform-Publisher Collaborations as Facebook and News Outlets Team to Fight Misinformation

In December 2016, shortly after the US presidential election, Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes—entered a partnership to combat misinformation. Motivated by a variety of concerns and values, relying on different understandings of misinformation, and with a diverse set of stakeholders in mind, they created a collaboration designed to leverage the partners’ different forms of cultural power, technological skill, and notions of public service. Concretely, the partnership centers around managing a flow of stories that may be considered false. Here’s how it works: through a proprietary process that mixes algorithmic and human intervention, Facebook identifies candidate stories; these stories are then served to the five news and fact-checking partners through a partners-only dashboard that ranks stories according to popularity. Partners independently choose stories from the dashboard, do their usual fact-checking work, and append their fact-checks to the stories’ entries in the dashboards. Facebook uses these fact-checks to adjust whether and how it shows potentially false stories to its users. Variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or an unavoidable coupling of organizations through circumstances beyond either’s exclusive control, the partnership emerged as a key example of platform-publisher collaboration. This report contextualizes the partnership, traces its dynamics through a series of interviews, and uses it to motivate a general set of questions that future platform press partnerships might ask themselves before collaborating

Probably Speech, Maybe Free: Toward a Probabilistic Understanding of Online Expression and Platform Governance

Considering the cost of applying a probablistic statistical framework to First Amendment questions on digital platform

Controlling the Conversation: The Ethics of Social Platforms and Content Moderation

With social platforms’ prevailing dominance, there are numerous debates around who owns information, content, and the audience itself: the publisher, or the platform where the content is discovered—or not discovered, as the case may be. Platforms rely heavily on algorithms to decide what to surface to their users across the globe, and they also rely on algorithms to decide what content is taken down. Meanwhile, publishers are making similar decisions on a significantly smaller scale, and not necessarily algorithmically or quite as generically. But how are any of these decisions made? And what are the various factors taken into account to ensure that the decision-making is fair and ethical? On February 23, 2018, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism hosted a Policy Exchange Forum followed by a conference on the topic of “Controlling the Conversation: The Ethics of Social Platforms and Content.” The Policy Exchange Forum was a closed-group discussion that followed the Chatham House Rule. The discussion broadly focused on three topics: “Ethics of Moderation”, “Moderation Tools”, and “Technological Challenges.

Paywalls’ Impact on Local News Websites’ Traffic and Their Civic and Business Implications

In an attempt to manage a looming revenue crisis in their transition from print to digital, many local newspapers have implemented user payment (paywalls) in their online editions. This paper asks what the business and civic implications of such introduction of user payment are. Comparing audience metrics on a sample of eight local news websites (four Norwegian, four Danish) for 52 weeks before and after paywall introduction, this study finds that the numbers of both pageviews and unique visitors decrease upon the transition from free to fee-based access to the news. Hard paywalls have a more negative immediate effect on traffic than soft paywalls. This difference equalizes over time and the traffic mainly remains at a decreased level regardless of paywall type. Traffic development in Norway is somewhat better than in Denmark in a short-term perspective, but national differences also even out over time. We posit that while paywalls may constitute a new revenue stream for local news media under financial pressure, they also challenge the civic function of the local news media since fewer people consult them.acceptedVersio

Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare

Making Sense of Blockchain Applications:A Typology for HCI

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of this new technology. We argue that there is a unique role for the HCI community in linking the design and application of blockchain technology towards lived experience and the articulation of human values. In particular, we note how the accounting of transactions, a trust in immutable code and algorithms, and the leveraging of distributed crowds and publics around vast interoperable databases all relate to longstanding issues of importance for the field. We conclude by highlighting core conceptual and methodological challenges for HCI researchers beginning to work with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies

Unconventional classifiers and anti-social machine intelligences. Artists creating spaces of contestation and sensibilities of difference across human-machine networks

Artificial intelligence technologies and data structures required for training have become more accessible in recent years and this has enabled artists to incorporate these technologies into their works to various ends. This paper is concerned with the ways in which present day artists are engaging with artificial intelligence, specifically material practices that endeavor to use these technologies and their potential non-human agencies as collaborators with differential objectives to commercial fields. The intentions behind artists’ use of artificial intelligence is varied. Many works, with the accelerating assimilation of artificial intelligence technologies into everyday life, follow a critical path. Such as attempting to unveil how artificial intelligence materially works and is embodied, or to critically work through the potential future adoptions of artificial intelligence technologies into everyday life. However, I diverge from unpacking the criticality of these works and instead follow the suggestion of Bruno Latour to consider their composition. As for Latour, critique implies the capacity to discover a ‘truer’ understanding of reality, whereas composition addresses immanence, how things come together and the emergence of experience. Central to this paper are works that seek to collaborate with artificial intelligence, and to use it to drift out of rather than to affirm or mimic human agency. This goes beyond techniques such as ‘style transfer’ which is seen to support and encode existing human biases or patterns in data. Collaboration with signifies a recognition of a wider field of what constitutes the activity of artistic composition beyond being a singularly human, or AI, act, where composition can be situated in a system. This paper will look at how this approach allows an artist to consider the emerging materiality of a system which they are composing, its resistances and potentials, and the possibilities afforded by the exchange between human and machine intentions in co-compositio

New way to encourage written literacy through oral language

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves [160]-165).This thesis presents a new approach and a new interface to let children practice written literacy skills using oral language. Specifically, I argue that language composition is learned by practicing a set of cognitive skills that are independent of the medium in which the linguistic meaning is represented. Furthermore, I claim that tangible, technology-enhanced toys with specific features can support the development of these skills through open-ended language play. To investigate this claim, I developed a new model of composition, called the TellTale Composition Model, to address aspects of both oral and written language. This model supports the following features of children's language play: voice; structure; reference; reflection and revision; and sharing and discussion. A new toy, called TellTale, was built to support this composition model. Three studies were conducted to evaluate both its usability and the model's validity. The findings indicate that a toy that lets children create, segment, organize and link oral language through play with a tangible toy in a social setting helps them practice important cognitive skills crucial for later literacy. Preliminary data also suggest that such a toy can help identify children's language learning disabilities and the linguistic strategies used by children of different socio-economic strata. Both TellTale and the composition model on which its design was based suggest several new ways digital media can let children become engaged and skillful authors.Michael J. Ananny.S.M

Lets Talk about Race: Identity, Chatbots, and AI

Why is it so hard for chatbots to talk about race? This work explores how the biased contents of databases, the syntactic focus of natural language processing, and the opaque nature of deep learning algorithms cause chatbots difficulty in handling race-talk. In each of these areas, the tensions between race and chatbots create new opportunities for people and machines. By making the abstract and disparate qualities of this problem space tangible, we can develop chatbots that are more capable of handling race-talk in its many forms. Our goal is to provide the HCI community with ways to begin addressing the question, how can chatbots handle race-talk in new and improved ways

DÍA DE MUERTOS Y HALLOWEEN DE LA FACULTAD DE QUÍMICA 2017.

La comunidad estudiantil del Organismo Académico Facultad de Química, el martes 31 de octubre de 2017, a docentes, administrativos y autoridades, expone abiertamente su talento de participante creativo grupal en el concurso DÍA DE MUERTOS Y HALLOWEEN ESTUDIANTIL EN INGLÉS-ESPAÑOL, que organiza la maestra y coordinadora de Inglés, maestra en nuevas tecnologías aplicadas a la educación Sara Ananny Iturbe Peñaloza