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Seminar Series

September 17

Ethan Zuckerman - The Quotidian Web

Ethan Zuckerman
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

Virtual Event
Add to Calendar 2024-09-17 16:00:00 2024-09-17 17:00:00 America/New_York Ethan Zuckerman - The Quotidian Web Abstract:Internet researchers have a bias towards the extraordinary. We pay special attention to unusual phenomena like mis/disinformation, to successful activist campaigns, to authors and creators who reach large audiences - and for good reason. But what might we learn from studying ordinary online behavior? Our lab has developed tools to take random samples of YouTube and TikTok by guessing at valid video addresses. The videos we collect often have fewer than 100 views and frequently were not intended for viewership by broad audiences. What can we learn about the role of online video in different languages and cultures from this data? How does an archive of random videos allow us to study cultural change over time? What are the ethical pitfalls of studying data that is public but obscure? Bio:Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the use of new media technologies by activists and alternative business and governance models for the internet. He is the author of Mistrust: How Losing Trust in Institutions Provides Tools to Transform Them (2021), Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013) and co-author with Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci of "The Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media" forthcoming on MIT Press. With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. It showcases news and opinions from citizen media in more than 150 nations and 30 languages, publishing editions in 20 languages. Previously, Zuckerman directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT and taught at the MIT Media Lab. He and his family live in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts. This talk is remote over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97272203935. https://mit.zoom.us/j/97272203935

September 24

HCI Seminar - Lane Harrison - Shaping Visualization Ecosystems in a Changing Technosocial Landscape

Lane Harrison
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-G882 (Hewlett)
Add to Calendar 2024-09-24 16:00:00 2024-09-24 17:00:00 America/New_York HCI Seminar - Lane Harrison - Shaping Visualization Ecosystems in a Changing Technosocial Landscape Abstract:Progress across visualization systems, data journalism, and social media has brought charts and interactives into peoples’ daily lives. But this progress brings new challenges: How do people engage with visualizations they encounter? How might people differ in their ability to read and use visualizations, and can these skills be improved? Do visualization tools and creators favor audiences with particular social or cultural characteristics over others? This talk will cover research initiatives that interrogate these challenges through experiments and design, and propose how we might anticipate and respond to coming shifts in visualization ecosystems.Bio:Lane Harrison is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Before joining WPI, Lane was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University. Lane directs the Visualization and Information Equity lab at WPI (VIEW), where he and students leverage computational methods to understand and shape how people engage with data visualizations and visual analytics systems. Lane’s work has been supported by the NSF, DoED, DoD, and industry.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91991608861 32-G882 (Hewlett)

October 01

Suresh Venkatasubramanian - Moles, Turtles, and Snakes: On what it means to do practical AI governance research

Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Brown University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

32-D463 (Star)
Add to Calendar 2024-10-01 16:00:00 2024-10-01 17:00:00 America/New_York Suresh Venkatasubramanian - Moles, Turtles, and Snakes: On what it means to do practical AI governance research Abstract:Over the last decade or so, we've built an impressive list of examples of AI gone wrong, and a fairly comprehensive list of reasons why. Critique of technological systems, especially those based on ML and AI, are a common and arguably necessary counterweight to the hype around AI. But I'd argue that perhaps our desire to critique has gone a little too far, in that we seem unwilling to answer the question "if not this, then what" with anything but "nothing". I think we can do better than that, while still not falling into the trap of technosolutionism. We're at a moment where the door has been opened to provide methods, tools, and general sociotechnical systems - for auditing, for measurement, and for mitigation. These will necessarily be imperfect, and will have to iterated over and improved, again and again. But they can help us reimagine more expansively what's possible, and more importantly help show policymakers what's possible, when thinking about the next wave of AI governance work. I'll illustrate this with a few examples from my own recent research.Bio:Suresh Venkatasubramanian directs the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR) with the Data Science Institute at Brown University, and is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science. He recently finished a stint in the Biden-Harris administration, where he served as Assistant Director for Science and Justice in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In that capacity, he helped co-author the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.Prior to Brown University, Suresh was at the University of Utah, where as an assistant professor he was the John and Marva Warnock Assistant Professor. He has received a CAREER award from the NSF for his work in the geometry of probability, a test-of-time award at ICDE 2017 for his work in privacy, and a KAIS Journal award for his work on auditing black-box models. His research on algorithmic fairness has received press coverage across the globe, including NPR’s Science Friday, NBC, and CNN, as well as in other media outlets. He is a past member of the Computing Community Consortium Council of the CRA, spent 4 years (2017-2021) as a member of the board of the ACLU in Utah, and is a past member of New York City’s Failure to Appear Tool (FTA) Research Advisory Council, the Research Advisory Council for the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania and the Utah State Auditor's Commission on protecting privacy and preventing discrimination. He was recently named by Fast Company to their AI20 list of thinkers shaping the world of generative AI. This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94023976132. 32-D463 (Star)

October 08

Remco Chang - Conceptualizing Visualizations as Functions, Spaces, and Grammars

Remco Chang
Department of Computer Science, Tufts University

Part Of

4:00P
- 5:00P

Location

D463 (Star)
Add to Calendar 2024-10-08 16:00:00 2024-10-08 17:00:00 America/New_York Remco Chang - Conceptualizing Visualizations as Functions, Spaces, and Grammars Abstract:Visualization is often regarded as a static artifact – an image-based representation of data. However, from a mathematical and programmatic perspective, it can be more accurately described as a function: an action that transforms data and parameters into visual form. By framing visualization as a function, we can investigate its properties by examining its inputs (domain) and outputs (range), both of which can be conceptualized as distinct spaces. In this talk, I first present our work on learning the input and output spaces of visualizations using neural networks. I then introduce other spaces considered by the visualization research community, such as pixel space, interaction space, and design space. Finally, I discuss our research on viewing visualizations through the lens of grammars, demonstrating how this approach helps us uncover key properties and delineate the boundaries between data, task, and visualization spaces.Bio: Remco Chang is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. He received his BA in Computer Science and Economics from Johns Hopkins University, his MSc from Brown University, and his PhD from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Charlotte. Prior to his PhD, he worked at Boeing, developing real-time flight tracking and visualization software, and later served as a research scientist at UNC Charlotte. His research interests include visual analytics, information visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI), and databases. His work has been supported by the NSF, DARPA, Navy, DOD, Walmart Foundation, Merck, DHS, MIT Lincoln Lab, and Draper, and he is a co-founder of two startups, Hopara.io and GraphPolaris. He has received best paper, best poster, and honorable mention awards at InfoVis, VAST, CHI, EuroVis. He served as program chair of the IEEE VIS conference in 2018 and 2019 and is the general chair of VIS in 2024. Additionally, he is an associate editor for the ACM TiiS and IEEE TVCG journals and received the NSF CAREER Award in 2015. He has mentored 11 PhD students and postdocs who now hold faculty positions at institutions such as Smith College (x2), DePaul University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Washington, University of San Francisco, University of Colorado Boulder, WPI, San Francisco State, the University of Utrecht, and Brandeis, as well as 7 researchers working in companies and government agencies like Google, Draper, Facebook, MIT Lincoln Lab (x2), the National Renewable Energy Lab, and Idaho National Lab.This talk will also be streamed over Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/99222844035. D463 (Star)