Speakers

Ridwan Oloyede is the assistant director for the professional development workflow at Certa Foundation’s Center for Law and Innovation. He most recently co-authored Certa Foundation’s report on the state of AI regulation in Africa and analyzed Rwanda’s unique approach to AI regulation as the first mover in Africa. Previously Ridwan Oloyede co-founded Tech Hive Advisor, PrivacyLensAfrica, and Privacy Bar & Bants. He has been designated as an expert at the Council of Europe’s Data Protection Unit. 

Carlos Affonzo De Souza is director of the Institute of Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro and a professor of law at Rio de Janeiro State University and the University of Ottawa Law School. Carlos De Souza is an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information and Society Project. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Global Network of Internet & Society Research Centers, and his recent work has focused on Brazil’s efforts to regulate AI ahead of November’s G20 meeting and the emerging rights-based approach in that regulation.

Mason Kortz is a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He brings his legal training and background as a software and database developer to his work at the Cyberlaw Clinic. His recent research focuses on the law of artificial intelligence and algorithms, and he has written and presented on how algorithmic decision-making has impacted intellectual property rights, product liability requirements, and the criminal legal system.

Gabriele Mazzini is the architect and lead author of the EU AI Act by the European Commission, where he has focused on technology law and policy for the past seven years. Prior to joining the European Commission, Gabriele served in the European Parliament and the Court of Justice and was Associate General Counsel at the Millennium Villages Project, an international development initiative across several sub-Saharan countries. Gabriele Mazzini is a Connection Science Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In his lecture, Rob Kitchin addresses a number of political and normative questions related to smart cities. He discusses the ethical values and principles that determine the desirable urban environment we want to create and live in. Therefore, his presentation explores how these measures ensure equal access to technology and decision-making, foster social justice and agency among all citizens. It also examines how these concerns are conceived and operationalised within smart cities around the world. How do these models and visions vary internationally, for example, between Asian and European countries? The final part of the talk will explore the ‘right to the smart city’ and ‘decentering the smart city’. How can these notions be used to create cities that truly prioritise human needs?

In Germany, cash is the only unrestricted legal tender and still the most commonly used means of payment. Compared with non-cash means of payment, cash is an important corrective in payment transactions. No other non-cash means of payment achieves a similarly high level of inclusion and provides comparable protection of privacy. Nevertheless, the use of non-cash means of payment continues to increase in Germany. Card-based payment methods are of particular importance - either directly with the plastic card (debit or credit card) or with the virtual card via which non-cash payment methods are processed in the background, as is common in mobile payment and Internet payment methods.

BigTechs - large companies with established technology platforms such as Alibaba, Amazon, and Facebook - are now established players in payments. Given the increasing presence and market power of U.S. card providers and BigTechs, as well as the likely growing influence of Chinese BigTechs in payments, the question of how to preserve the European banking industry's ability to act will arise more strongly in the future.

The TAB report provides an overview of developments in payment transactions up to and including February 2021, examining and comparing the specific characteristics of cash and selected non-cash payment solutions as well as payment behavior in Germany, Sweden, and China. The brief study is rounded off by an examination of the changing power structure in payment transactions as a result of the emergence of new players and the reactions of traditional credit institutions and central banks to this.

The TAB report and the accompanying policy brief TAB-Fokus Nr. 37 (both currently only in German) are available online. An English translation of the TAB-Fokus will follow soon.

How can economically vulnerable media regain editorial independence and stand up against the powerful propaganda channels? To find answers to this question, this edition of the lecture series features two scholars who specialize in the digital transformation of media systems in democratic societies and the particular challenges in Central and Eastern Europe.

Marius Dragomir talks about the changes experienced by media systems in Central and Eastern Europe and presents the findings of his research into the impact of media capture on independent journalism. He highlights risks that independent journalism is likely to face in the near future. Krisztina Rozgonyi analyses how digital societies in Central and Eastern Europe are embedded in a politically manipulated communicative context and sheds light on its historical roots. This unique situation is further complicated by social media platforms, resulting in an increased vulnerability of the public to hate speech, disinformation, and propaganda.

Marius Dragomir is the Director of the Center for Media, Data, and Society. In 2015, he founded MediaPowerMonitor, a community of experts in media policy covering trends in regulation, business, and politics that influence journalism. He has spent the past two decades in the media research field, specializing in media and communication regulation, digital media, governing structures of public service media, and media and ownership regulation. Marius is now running a slew of comparative research projects including the Media Influence Matrix, a global research project looking into power relations and undue influence in news media.

Krisztina Rozgonyi is a senior scientist at the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies (CMC) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and a senior expert on international media, telecommunications, and IP legal and policy. She works with international and European organizations, national governments, and regulators as an advisor on media freedom, spectrum policy, and digital platform governance. Her recent work for the Venice Commission focused on responding to disinformation online. Krisztina Rozgonyi has also engaged recently with the OSCE Representative on Media Freedom as an expert on Artificial Intelligence & media pluralism.

Whether in medicine, battery research, or materials science, researchers everywhere are seeking innovative substances. In the process, they can often predict the desired chemical and physical properties in great detail, right down to atomic level. However, the range of all potential chemical compounds alone is so vast that it would take years to find the appropriate substance. An interdisciplinary research group at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) at Technische Universität Berlin has now developed an algorithm which uses AI to implement inverse chemical design and thus generate targeted molecules based on their desired properties. The research group's publication titled "Inverse design of 3d molecular structures with conditional generative neural networks" has now been published in the renowned journal Nature Communications.

The search for suitable molecules for specific medical or industrial applications is an extremely complex and expensive process. "Hypothetically, there are an incredible number of possible structures. However, only a tiny fraction possesses the specific chemical or physical properties required for a particular application," explains Dr. Kristof Schütt, BIFOLD Junior Fellow at TU Berlin. A wealth of methods has been developed in recent years capable of predicting the chemical properties and energetic states of given substances using AI. But even using these efficient methods, the search for molecules with specific properties has proven difficult in practice, as it is still necessary to search through an overwhelming number of candidates.

Agriculture is a highly technical economic sector whose production processes are based on the use of natural resources and the keeping of animals. How the increasing demands for climate protection, sustainability and animal welfare can be reconciled with the task of food security is a highly virulent question that has also repeatedly occupied TAB. Digital innovations, which are supposed to enable highly precise, data-driven agricultural production, have raised hopes of being able to better balance this area of tension. As early as 2005, precision agriculture was the subject of a TAB study - the TAB reports and Policy Briefs no. 31 and no. 32 , which have just been published, provide an updated overview of the state of digitisation in agriculture and the associated social perspectives and challenges.

The digital applications used in livestock and crop production are extremely diverse, ranging from technical hardware such as GPS control, drones, robotics and sensors to smartphone apps and cloud-based farm management software. It is often said that agriculture is a digital pioneer, which may be true if the technology on offer alone is taken as the yardstick. But the extent to which innovative digital technology is actually already being used on farms is still unclear due to a lack of reliable surveys. A significant application hurdle for many farms is the relatively high investment costs, which, in conjunction with economies of scale, mean that the economic use of many digital processes can only be expected for larger farms. In view of the existing structural change in agriculture, an important political task is to ensure equitable access to these technologies. Another controversial issue is who should have access to agricultural data and be able to profit from its commercial use. Many farmers are concerned that the existing monopolization tendencies in the upstream and downstream stages of the value chain (and thus the dependencies of smaller farms) could be further strengthened.

The central promise of digitization is to be able to control agricultural production processes more efficiently, which in principle can lead to both environmental benefits and operational savings. However, the magnitude of these savings is not easy to determine, as local production conditions have a strong influence on the reduction effects that can be achieved in practice. An important framework condition is also the degree of networking of the individual technologies. The potential of digitization can ultimately only be exploited if agricultural production on farms is "intelligently" networked with upstream and downstream value creation processes (manufacturers of inputs such as seeds and pesticides, food retailers, etc.). However, this is based on prerequisites - such as broadband coverage, provision of open machine interfaces and free availability of geodata - that have not yet been fully realized and make Agriculture 4.0 still appear to be a vision of the future. Options for action such as improving the infrastructural framework conditions, ensuring the participation of smaller family farms and, in general, the data sovereignty of farmers or closing knowledge and research gaps are discussed in Working Report No. 194. The report concludes by stating that a forward-looking design for numerous questions is dependent on answers that point beyond agriculture and concern, for example, competition policy.



What is bias in translation programs?

Have you ever used machine translation for translating a sentence to Estonian? In some languages, like Estonian, pronouns, and nouns do not indicate gender. When translating to English, the software has to make a choice. Which word becomes male and which female? However, often it is a choice grounded in stereotypes. Is this just a coincidence?

Authors:

Freya Hewett Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin: AI & Society Lab

Sami Nenno Studentischer Mitarbeiter: AI & Society Lab

Within the framework of a ten-week virtual research sprint hosted by the HIIG, thirteen international researchers from various disciplines came together to tackle the challenges posed by automation in content moderation. Their work resulted in policy briefings focused on algorithmic audits and on increasing the transparency and accountability of automated content moderation systems. We warmly invite you to learn more about their findings and attend their output presentations followed by a panel discussion.

Agenda

Opening remarks on the project and the research sprint by research director Wolfgang Schulz and research lead Alexander Pirang

Presentations of the research outputs by the sprint fellows:

• David Morar, guest researcher at George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs, USA
• Aline Iramina, PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, Great Britain
• Sunimal Mendis, lecturer at the University of Tilburg, Netherlands

Followed by a panel discussion moderated by Jennifer Boone with:

• Angelica Fernandez, fellow of the research sprint and PhD candidate at the University of Luxembourg
• Philipp Otto, founder and director of the iRights.lab
• Matthias Kettemann, associated researcher at the HIIG and scientific lead of the research project ”Regulatory Structures and the Emergence of Rules in Online Spaces” at the Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung I Hans-Bredow Institut 

On 3 March 2020, AlgorithmWatch launched a project to monitor Instagram’s newsfeed algorithm. Volunteers could install a browser add-on that scraped their Instagram newsfeeds. Data was sent to a database we used to study how Instagram prioritizes pictures and videos in a user’s timeline.

Over the last 14 months, about 1,500 volunteers installed the add-on. With their data, we were able to show that Instagram likely encouraged content creators to post pictures that fit specific representations of their body, and that politicians were likely to reach a larger audience if they abstained from using text in their publications (Facebook denied both claims). Although we could not conduct a precise audit of Instagram’s algorithm, this research is among the most advanced studies ever conducted on the platform. The project was supported by the European Data Journalism Network and by the Dutch foundation SIDN. It was done in partnership with Mediapart in France, NOS, Groene Amsterdammer and Pointer in the Netherlands, Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany and was covered by dozens of news outlets over the world.

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Bernard Harcourt (Columbia Law School, Professor of Law and of Political Science)

Frank Pasquale (Brooklyn Law School, Professor of Law)

Christoph Burchard (Goethe University, Professor of Criminal Justice etc.)

Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann (Goethe University, Professor of Public Law etc.)

Jürgen Kaube (Co-Editor at Large, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

Algorithms – and the actors behind them – are surveying and impacting ever more dimensions of our modern lives. They recommend which movies to watch; they calculate risk appropriate credit scores; and they play a role in meting out “just” punishment; to only name a few areas. At the same time, they correct imperfect human decisions and add new informational dimensions to decisions prior impossible. To assess and evaluate the impeding transformations of normative orders in a predictive society, we approach algorithms in light of the juxtaposition of trust and control. Why and under which conditions do – or don’t – we trust algorithms? Indeed, can and should we trust them? Especially because their algorithmic normativity was (not) produced in justificatory fora where trust is brought about in and through social conflicts? But then, how much trust – if any – should algorithms put into us as citizens? For example, do they have to presume us non-dangerous and harmless? Vice versa, how much control do we need to retain over algorithms? And how much control should they exert over us? Can we use algorithms to control the effect of algorithms and thus create a meta-level of trust? Especially in order to negate, or as a matter of fact: to entertain, the freedom to deviate in the algorithmic society? These are but a few of the questions that internationally renowned speakers raise in “Algorithms between Trust and Control”, a lecture series convened by Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann and Christoph Burchard, and co-organized by the research clusters ConTrust, Normative Orders and ZEVEDI in the line of the Frankfurt Talks on Information Law and under the auspices of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

The lectures will take place via Zoom. Please register to receive the login data.

As we move into a world in which algorithms, robots, and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to better understand the nature of AI and its implications for human agency. Helga Nowotny argues that at the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future.

These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care.

Helga Nowotny is one of the most prominent scholars in science studies worldwide, an area that counted Yehuda Elkana as one of its pioneers and promoters. For several decades Helga Nowotny has been one of the most influential institution builders in European higher education and research. She has worked with European intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations and bodies, such as the European Science Foundation, governmental agencies in several countries of East and West as well as independent organizations and committees of scholars. She has taken part in or directly led, the design and establishment of innovative new institutions, such as the European Research Council, Collegium Budapest or Central European University.

The Yehuda Elkana Fellow’s activities are held in partnership with Bard College through the Open Society University Network and supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly leveraged across industries to offer superior products and services and optimize business processes. The proliferation of AI, however, raises a number of ethical questions on data privacy, fairness, bias, and accountability. In the future, will AI decide who is insured and who is not? Who will get which level of insurance coverage? And will vulnerable groups be left behind uninsured? This talk focuses on the risks related to the use of AI in the insurance sector.

This event is organized by the Department of Strategy and Innovation.

Jonathan Simon (UC Berkeley, Professor of Criminal Justice Law)

Algorithms – and the actors behind them – are surveying and impacting ever more dimensions of our modern lives. They recommend which movies to watch; they calculate risk-appropriate credit scores; and they play a role in meting out “just” punishment; to only name a few areas. At the same time, they correct imperfect human decisions and add new informational dimensions to decisions prior impossible. To assess and evaluate the impeding transformations of normative orders in a predictive society, we approach algorithms in light of the juxtaposition of trust and control. Why and under which conditions do – or don’t – we trust algorithms? Indeed, can and should we trust them? Especially because their algorithmic normativity was (not) produced in justificatory fora where trust is brought about in and through social conflicts? But then, how much trust – if any – should algorithms put into us as citizens? For example, do they have to presume us non-dangerous and harmless? Vice versa, how much control do we need to retain over algorithms? And how much control should they exert over us? Can we use algorithms to control the effect of algorithms and thus create a meta-level of trust? Especially in order to negate, or as a matter of fact: to entertain, the freedom to deviate in the algorithmic society? These are but a few of the questions that internationally renowned speakers raise in “Algorithms between Trust and Control”, a lecture series convened by Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann and Christoph Burchard, and co-organized by the research clusters ConTrust, Normative Orders and ZEVEDI in the line of the Frankfurt Talks on Information Law and under the auspices of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

Prof. Jonathan Simon (Professor of Criminal Justice Law, UC Berkeley)

Convenors: Prof. Christoph Burchard (Goethe University, Professor of Criminal Justice, PI of ConTrust and "Normative Orders") and Prof. Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann (Goethe University, Professor of Public Law, PI of ConTrust)

Presented by:

Forschungsverbund "Normative Ordnungen" der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, "ConTrust" - ein Clusterprojekt des Landes Hessen, Frankfurter Gespräche zum Informationsrecht des Lehrstuhls für Öffentliches Recht, Umweltrecht, Informationsrecht und Verwaltungswissenschaften und Zentrum verantwortungsbewusste Digitalisierung

Burkhart Schäfer (University of Edinburgh, Professor of Computational Legal Theory)

Opening Remarks by Prof. Enrico Schleiff (President of Goethe University)

Opening Remarks by Prof. Rainer Forst (Speaker of ConTrust and Normative Orders)

Welcoming Remarks & Comment Prof. Klaus Günther (Dean of the Faculty of Law Goethe University)

Algorithms – and the actors behind them – are surveying and impacting ever more dimensions of our modern lives. They recommend which movies to watch; they calculate risk-appropriate credit scores; and they play a role in meting out “just” punishment; to only name a few areas. At the same time, they correct imperfect human decisions and add new informational dimensions to decisions prior impossible. To assess and evaluate the impeding transformations of normative orders in a predictive society, we approach algorithms in light of the juxtaposition of trust and control. Why and under which conditions do – or don’t – we trust algorithms? Indeed, can and should we trust them? Especially because their algorithmic normativity was (not) produced in justificatory fora where trust is brought about in and through social conflicts? But then, how much trust – if any – should algorithms put into us as citizens? For example, do they have to presume us non-dangerous and harmless? Vice versa, how much control do we need to retain over algorithms? And how much control should they exert over us? Can we use algorithms to control the effect of algorithms and thus create a meta-level of trust? Especially in order to negate, or as a matter of fact: to entertain, the freedom to deviate in the algorithmic society? These are but a few of the questions that internationally renowned speakers raise in “Algorithms between Trust and Control”, a lecture series convened by Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann and Christoph Burchard, and co-organized by the research clusters ConTrust, Normative Orders and ZEVEDI in the line of the Frankfurt Talks on Information Law and under the auspices of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

In the latest issue of SWP Comment, PD Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann and Annegret Bendiek explain why the new EU cybersecurity strategy is too one-sided. The focus should not only be on deterrence and defense, but also on trust and security. They advocate for promoting cyber diplomacy in the European Union.

Bendiek, A.; Kettemann, M. C. (2021): Revisiting the EU Cybersecurity Strategy: A Call for EU Cyber Diplomacy. In: SWP Comment

• In this panel we will discuss the risks of bias, AI-driven discrimination, and unfair differentiation in the health sector. Is there something specific to discrimination risks in the health sector?

• Are the trade-offs between the benefits and risks of AI different in this sector as opposed to other sectors?

• Is there a health sector-specific notion of fairness? If so, are sector-specific rules needed for AI in health?

• Should legal protection against AI-driven discrimination and unfair differentiation be improved and who should attend to this: non-discrimination scholars or bioethicists?

We aim for a lively discussion panel: no presentations and no slides, but a discussion among the panelists and with the audience. The panel will be made up of experts from different disciplines and backgrounds.

Moderator:

Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius iHub & iCIS Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)

Speakers:

Minna Ruckenstein Tena Šimonović Einwalter Equinet (HR)

Carlos Castillo Universitat Pompeu Fabra (ES)

Tamar Sharon iHub, Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)

• How does the work of Council of Europe (CAHAI - Ad hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence), European Commission (AI HLEG - High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence), complement other AI policy initiatives under OECD, G20 & UNESCO? Are all these initiatives aligned with each other in terms of AI regulation and priorities?

• How has the experience of COVID-19 changed the perspective, approach, and priorities for the regulation of AI?

• Is global regulation of high-risk AI applications a possibility in the face of AI race and national strategies?

• The public sector encapsulates most of the high-risk areas for AI and its impact on fundamental rights. What are the biggest challenges regulating the use of AI by the public sector?

Moderator: Merve Hickok AIethicist.org (US)

Speakers:

Peggy Valcke Council of Europe Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAHAI) (INT)

Friederike Reinhold AlgorithmWatch (DE)

Oreste Pollicino OECD Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (IT)

Alexandra Geese MEP (EU) Member of the European Parliament for Germany

Founded in 2006, ITIF is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute—a think tank. Its mission is to formulate, evaluate, and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation and boost productivity to spur growth, opportunity, and progress. ITIF’s goal is to provide policymakers around the world with high-quality information, analysis, and recommendations they can trust. To that end, ITIF adheres to a high standard of research integrity with an internal code of ethics grounded in analytical rigor, policy pragmatism, and independence from external direction or bias.

Focus

ITIF focuses on a host of critical issues at the intersection of technological innovation and public policy—including economic issues related to innovation, competitiveness, trade, and globalization; and technology-related issues in the areas of information technology and data, broadband telecommunications, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, agricultural biotechnology, and clean energy. (Read more about ITIF’s policy goals and values.)

Ongoing research programs and educational activities include:

• Setting the policy agenda on technology, innovation, and global competition issues by producing original research reports and analytical commentary;
• Shaping public debate by hosting events, giving speeches and presentations, providing official testimony, publishing op-eds, and serving as expert issue analysts in the news media; and
• Advising policymakers through direct interaction in Washington, D.C., and other state, national, and regional capitals around the world.

On the strength and influence of this work, the University of Pennsylvania has ranked ITIF as the world’s leading think tank for science and technology policy, and one of the top 27 U.S. think tanks overall.

Expertise

ITIF is led by its president and founder, Robert D. Atkinson, an internationally recognized policy scholar and widely published author whom The New Republic has named one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation,” Washingtonian Magazine has called a “Tech Titan,” and Government Technology Magazine has judged to be one of the 25 top “Doers, Dreamers and Drivers of Information Technology.” Under Atkinson, ITIF’s team of policy analysts and fellows includes authors and recognized experts in the fields of economics, tax policy, trade, telecommunications, privacy, cybersecurity, and life sciences, among many others.

ITIF is home to the highly regarded Center for Data Innovation, which develops and promotes policy ideas to capitalize on the tremendous economic and social benefits that data-driven innovation can offer. ITIF also launched—and spearheads—the Global Trade and Innovation Policy Alliance, an international network of think tanks that conduct evidence-based research into policies that can foster greater trade liberalization, curb “innovation mercantilism,” and encourage governments to play proactive roles in spurring innovation and productivity.

The Policy Lab Digital, Work & Society will combine projects and processes dealing with the digital transformation at the BMAS and use them to create a bigger picture of the labour market of the future. It will thus provide a central supporting function for academia, those people involved at a practical level and social partners. The Policy Lab will follow an approach where digitalisation is considered in a consistent and systematic manner based on its impact on people and their social and civic relationships. Especially against the background of a constantly changing digital economy, this approach will be based on the firm conviction that employment relationships can be oriented to the needs of employees and the requirements of good working practices.

While technology has certainly helped jump start movements like Black Lives Matter, critics say it has also played a role in not just amplifying racial tensions but has also actively reinforced systemic racism through the lack of diversity in its creators and the inherent biases within its algorithms themselves. Jim Steyer, CEO and founder of Common Sense Media and author of the book Which Side of History: How Technology Is Reshaping Technology and Our Lives, has devoted a section of the book to exploring just how entangled Silicon Valley has become in our national history of racism and inequality.

In this program, Steyer will be joined by book contributors Ellen Pao, CEO of Project Incude, and Theodore Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law. They will discuss technology’s role in exacerbating racial inequality in the United States and the leadership role Big Tech needs to take in order to move the nation forward. We’ll explore how racial inequality is baked into the very fabric of technological platforms, and how diversity, inclusion and equity might hold the solution to changing its course.

Iyad Rahwan is director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he founded and leads the Center for Humans and Machines. He is also an honorary professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technische Universität Berlin. Until June 2020, he was an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Rahwan holds a PhD in Information Systems (Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His work lies at the intersection of computer science and human behavior, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the societal impact of artificial intelligence and social media. In addition to various journal articles, Iyad Rahwan is co-author of the study Reply to: Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles and together with Jean-François Bonnefon he published the paper Machine Thinking, Fast and Slow (both 2020).

The event will be held in English.

We explore new models of thought and action

Modern societies are based on ever-changing sets of norms, procedures and structures that are intended to enable free and democratic coexistence. In times of fundamental social, economic and technical transformation, however, some of these institutions are reaching the limits of their ability to change and "broken concepts" are emerging. This term refers to ways of thinking, patterns of action or explanatory models that are so deeply connected to their previous context that they now seem to have come from a different era and need to be rethought. We want to research such broken concepts – such as the once-meaningful distinction between the offline and online world – and help overcome them by offering new models of thought and action. 

By doing so, we are actively shaping the society of the future. Based on the scientific competences brought together at the institute and its dedication to interdisciplinarity, HIIG can engage with current topics such as the "platformisation" of the economy and society or the use of artificial intelligence and question the underlying concepts, structures and norms.

The Center in Brief

We bring together the sharpest, most thoughtful people from around the globe to tackle the biggest challenges presented by the Internet. As an interdisciplinary, University-wide center with a global scope, we have an unparalleled track record of leveraging exceptional academic rigor to produce real- world impact. We pride ourselves on pushing the edges of scholarly research, building tools and platforms that break new ground, and fostering active networks across diverse communities. United by our commitment to the public interest, our vibrant, collaborative community of independent thinkers represents a wide range of philosophies and disciplines, making us a unique home for open-minded inquiry, debate, and experimentation.

Our mission: Foster research, education, and knowledge transfer in Informatics

Our goals:

• Foster quality of research in Informatics.
• Foster quality of education in Informatics.
• Foster knowledge transfer between academia and industry and society.
• Engage with society on the nature and impact of Informatics.
• Promote quality standards and best practices in research, education, and knowledge transfer.
• Foster relations between academia and government and public institutions.
• Foster co-operation with organisations having complementary goals.

That makes DESY not only a magnet for more than 3000 guest researchers from over 40 countries every year, but also a coveted partner for national and international cooperations. Committed young researchers find an exciting interdisciplinary setting at DESY. The research centre offers specialized training for a large number of professions. DESY cooperates with industry and business to promote new technologies that will benefit society and encourage innovations. This also benefits the metropolitan regions of the two DESY locations, Hamburg and Zeuthen near Berlin.

In response to increasing public pressure to tackle hate speech and other challenging content, platform companies have turned to algorithmic content moderation systems. These automated tools promise to be more effective and efficient in identifying potentially illegal or unwanted material. But algorithmic content moderation also raises many questions – all of which eschew simple answers. Where is the line between hate speech and freedom of expression – and how to automate this on a global scale? Should platforms scale the use of AI tools for illegal online speech, like terrorism promotion, or also for regular content governance? Are platforms’ algorithms over-enforcing against legitimate speech, or are they rather failing to limit hateful content on their sites? And how can policymakers ensure an adequate level of transparency and accountability in platforms’ algorithmic content moderation processes?

The Mainz-based biotech company BioNTech, which recently presented the first promising results for a coronavirus vaccine together with the US company Pfizer, is already conducting research on the next generation of RNA drugs at DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III. Using the P12 beamline, operated by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory EMBL, BioNTech has been investigating, together with the Universities of Mainz, Tel Aviv and Leiden as well as the Research Centre Jülich and EMBL, how so-called messenger RNA (mRNA) can be packaged better so as to be more effective in the target organism. The researchers are reporting a number of results in three papers, published in the journals Applied Nano Materials, Cells and Langmuir. The papers also illustrate the potential of analytical research carried out with the help of the research infrastructure available on the DESY campus.

ITIF hosted a debate in which Acemoglu and Atkinson laid out their views about the future of automation technology and the effects it may have on U.S. competitiveness and the economy.

Speakers 

Bernie Becker

Tax Reporter, POLITICO, Moderator

Robert D. Atkinson

President, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Speaker

Daron Acemoglu

Institute Professor, MIT, Speaker

The goal of this talk is not to claim that plants are intelligent or that plant sentience (if it exists) is of the same kind as human consciousness. Neither taking for granted that plants are intelligent and/or sentient, nor dismissing the possibility that they are, I shall argue that the time is ripe to cast the problem in a scientifically tractable manner. The goal is to invite constructive debate, and to scrutinize established objections and thinking vetoes to better understand the challenges of plant science. Paco Calvo is a Professor of Philosophy of Science, and Principal Investigator of MINTLab (Minimal Intelligence Lab) at the University of Murcia (Spain). He specialized in the philosophy of cognitive science courtesy of a Fulbright scholarship in the late 1990s (University of California, San Diego), and received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Glasgow (UK) in 2000. His research interests range broadly within the cognitive sciences, with special emphasis on ecological psychology, embodied cognitive science, and plant intelligence.

The lowest CO2 emissions are produced when HD video is streamed at home over a fibre optic connection, with only two grams of CO2 per hour of video streaming for the data centre and data transmission. A copper cable (VDSL) generates four grams per hour. UMTS data transmission (3G), however, produces 90 grams of CO2 per hour. If the transmission technology used to transmit data is 5G instead, only about five grams of CO2 are emitted per hour. The electricity used by the end device is not factored into this calculation.

Misinformation about COVID-19 has led to severe harms in multiple instances: as an example, a rumor that drinking methanol would cure the virus resulted in hundreds of deaths. While end-to-end encryption is an important privacy safeguard, this encryption prevents platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal, and others from employing centralized interventions and warnings about misinformation. Several options, however, from user interface changes to tip lines to having more intelligence on client devices offer hope.

In this presentation Dr Scott A. Hale will discuss how text similarity algorithms are being used to help fact-checkers locate misinformation, cluster similar misinformation, and identify existing fact-checks in the context of tip lines on platforms with end-to-end encryption. The presentation will detail research at the Oxford Internet Institute and Meedan, a global technology not-for-profit developing open-source tools for fact-checking and translation, that is actively being used by fact-checkers to improve the information available online.

Finally, I propose a statistical test as a baseline to identify and assess potential cases of algorithmic discrimination in Europe. Adoption of this statistical test will help push forward academic and policy debates around scalable solutions for fairness and non-discrimination in automated systems in Europe.

In her lecture Joanna Bryson will argue that there are really only two problems humanity has to solve: sustainability and inequality, or put another way: security and power. Or put a third way: how big of a pie can we make, and how do we slice up that pie? Life is not a zero-sum game. We use the security of sociality to construct public goods where everyone benefits. But still, every individual needs enough pie to thrive, and this is the challenge of inequality. Joanna Bryson will argue that understanding these processes answers the questions above. She will then look at how AI is presently affecting both these problems.

Joanna J Bryson, Professor of Ethics and Technology at Hertie School, is an academic recognised for broad expertise on intelligence, its nature, and its consequences. She advises governments, transnational agencies, and NGOs globally, particularly in AI policy. She holds two degrees each in psychology and AI (BA Chicago, MSc & MPhil Edinburgh, PhD MIT). Her work has appeared in venues ranging from reddit to the journal Science. She continues to research both the systems engineering of AI and the cognitive science of intelligence, with present focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation, and new models of governance for AI and ICT.

In this conversation, Jonathan Zittrain was joined by Microsoft President Brad Smith to discuss how big tech might rise to these new challenges and opportunities.

This event is part of the AI Policy Practice.

Philipp Staab is Professor of “Sociology of the Future of Work” at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF). As a sociologist he deals with the topics of technology, work, political economy and social inequality. In his research in recent years, he has focused on the leading companies of the commercial Internet such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent, as well as various start-ups.

The event will be held in English.

TAB's policy brief in English TAB-Fokus no. 24 PDF [2,58 MB] provides an overview of Legal Tech services and applications, assesses the potentials, risks and opportunities involved and explores further potential needs for action.

In this talk, Sandra Wachter, Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Law and Ethics of AI, Big Data, robotics and Internet Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford, examines EU law and jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice concerning non-discrimination and identifies a critical incompatibility between European notions of discrimination and existing work on algorithmic and automated fairness. 

Wachter discusses the evidential requirements for bringing a claim under EU non-discrimination law and propose a statistical test as a baseline to identify and assess potential cases of algorithmic discrimination in Europe.

Given its relevance for academic research, and our understanding of the presence of automated accounts in any given Twitter discourse, Adrian Rauchfleisch and Jonas Kaiser studied Botometer's diagnostic ability over time. To do so, Rauchfleisch and Kaiser collected the Botometer scores for five datasets in two languages (English/German) over three months. For this virtual event, Rauchfleisch and Kaiser discussed their findings and answered questions about the implications of their research.

All data are local. The term data set implies something discrete, complete, and portable, but it is none of those things. Examining a series of sources important for understanding public data in the United States—Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, the Digital Public Library of America, UCLA's Television News Archive, and the real estate marketplace Zillow—this talk explains how to analyze data settings rather than data sets.

The talk sets out six principles: all data are local; data have complex attachments to place; data are collected from heterogeneous sources; data and algorithms are inextricably entangled; interfaces recontextualize data; and data are indexes to local knowledge. Then, it provides a set of practical guidelines to follow. These findings are based on a combination of qualitative research on data cultures and exploratory data visualizations. Rebutting the myth of “digital universalism,” this work reminds audiences of the meaning-making power of the local.

Dr. Howard Stevenson is the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education, Professor of Africana Studies, in the Human Development & Quantitative Methods Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Executive Director of the Racial Empowerment Collaborative at Penn, designed to promote racial literacy in education, health, community and justice institutions.

This publication gives an overview of actors and areas of action and stresses that collective engagement is needed more than ever to further develop Internet governance, to strengthen multistakerholderism as well as multilateralism and to hinder the fragmentation of the net. The publication was created by iRights.Lab on behalf the FES.

Here you find the online version of "Who Governs the Internet?"

Julie E. Cohen is the Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center. She teaches and writes about surveillance, privacy and data protection, intellectual property, information platforms, and the ways that networked information and communication technologies are reshaping legal institutions. She is the author of Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2019);Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Association of Internet Researchers Book Award and was shortlisted for the Surveillance & Society Journal’s 2013 Book Prize; and numerous journal articles and book chapters.

The lecture will be held in English.

Palantir was founded in 2004, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Its founders wanted to help intelligence agencies organize the data they collected, so that they would identify threats before they could strike. It is widely rumored that its tools helped find Osama Bin Laden prior to his assassination in 2011 (another theory is that the US simply bribed Pakistani officials).

But Palantir is not good at making money. The company has never been profitable, in large part because it had to customize its products for each client, making economies of scale impossible. A new product launched in 2017, called Foundry, is supposed to solve this problem. Europe became the testing ground for this new commercial strategy, which relies largely on Foundry.

AlgorithmWatch asked close to forty German companies about their links to Palantir and browsed hundreds of open sources to map Palantir’s clients.

Palantir’s software is nothing special. Despite claims that it could turn “data landfills into gold mines,” it simply provides a visual interface that lets clients interact with their own data streams. It is built on top of existing technologies such as Apache Spark, a cluster-computing framework. An employee, who might not be privy to every product of the company, wrote in 2016 that Palantir did “no artificial intelligence”, “no machine learning” and “no magic”.

These relatively modest capabilities might explain why several clients, including American Express and Coca-Cola, dropped Palantir in the last few years. Giovanni Tummarello, co-founder of the Ireland-based Siren.io, a competitor, claimed in 2017 to have signed some of Palantir’s former clients, mostly due to lower prices.

Under the title “Zukunft Gesundheitsdaten — Wegweiser zu einer forschungskompatiblen elektronischen Patientenakte” (Future health data — a guide to a research-compatible electronic patient file), the iRights.Lab developed a comprehensive study on the subject of eHealth on behalf of Bundesdruckerei (federal printing house). It shows which challenges have to be mastered so that Germany can also use the potential of digitalization in the field of eHealth.

Here the study can be dowloaded in German.

The first part of the event consists of three virtual parallel workshops. The HIIG is proud to host the online workshop: “Citizens, give us your problems! How to Open Data without giving it away.” The event will conclude with a panel discussion about the workshops outcomes and the overarching question of how to enable a sustainable digitalisation in cities like Berlin. The virtual panel discussion will be open to a broader public through a livestream (on this website).

Panel Speaker

Andrea Cominola | Junior Professor for Smart Water Networks at the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) and Technische Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the modeling and management of water and energy demand, the detection of leakages and cyber-physical anomalies, behavior modeling, data mining and machine learning.

Luiza Bengtsson | Data, Actors, Infrastructures team member at HIIG and works on implementing Data & Society Interface research projects with the vision to enable open data access for public good, without data sharing in the classical sense and without collateral damage to individuals or institutions.

Ophélie Ivombo | Program officer for Digitisation of the Consumer Advice Centre Berlin and Bündnis Digitale Stadt Berlin. 

Thomas Krause | Project Manager Digitisation Strategy, Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises.

President Steinmeier participated in an interactive panel session on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of digital technologies across geographies and as viewed from different disciplines. The discussion was moderated by Urs Gasser, Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center and Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School, and included a Q&A.

In addition to the German President, the following experts joined the open dialogue:

• Jeanette Hofmann, Director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Professor of Internet Politics, Free University of Berlin
• Matthew Liao, Director of the Center for Bioethics, Arthur Zitrin Professor of Bioethics, New York University
• Melissa Nobles, Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Professor of Political Science, MIT
• Wolfgang Schulz, Director of the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institute, Professor for Media Law and Public Law, University of Hamburg
• Eva Weber-Guskar, Guest Professor for Philosophy, Humboldt University of Berlin
• Crystal S. Yang, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

This special event is part of the Berkman Klein Center’s Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative.

The case of content moderation by online platforms offers an interesting example. Platforms, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, are responsible for mediating much of the public discourse and governing access to speech and speakers around the world. Social media platforms use AI to match users and content, to adjudicate conflicting claims regarding the legitimate use of content on their systems and to detect and expeditiously remove illegal content. AI in content moderation is applied as a practical need to operate in a dynamic, ever growing digital landscape; as an innovative competitive advantage; or simply as measures to ensure legal compliance or to avoid a public outcry.

The use of AI to filter unwarranted content cannot be sufficiently addressed by traditional legal rights and procedures, since these tools are ill-equipped to address the robust, non-transparent and dynamic nature of governance by AI. Consequently, in a digital ecosystem governed by AI, we currently lack sufficient safeguards against the blocking of legitimate content. Moreover, we lack a space for negotiating meaning and for deliberating the legitimacy of particular speech.

Professor Elkin-Koren is the coauthor of The Limits of Analysis: Law and Economics of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age (2012) and Law, Economics and Cyberspace: The effects of Cyberspace on the Economic Analysis of Law (2004). She is the coeditor of Law and Information Technology (2011) and The Commodification of Information (2002). Her publications are listed here.

The report Identity-management and citizen scoring in Ghana, Rwanda, Tunisia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and China was commissioned to AlgorithmWatch by a public-sector organization, which asked not to be cited, last May. We recently obtained permission to publish it here.

In many African countries, the obligation to issue biometric passports in the early 2000s, which the United States and, later, members of the European Union demanded, opened the door to the biometric registration of whole populations. An industry was set up to provide fingerprints readers, facial recognition technology and a vast array of software to process this newly-acquired data.

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

In early 2016, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a professional association known as IEEE, launched a “global initiative to advance ethics in technology.” After almost three years of work and multiple rounds of exchange with experts on the topic, it released last April the first edition of Ethically Aligned Design, a 300-page treatise on the ethics of automated systems.

The general principles issued in the report focus on transparency, human rights and accountability, among other topics. As such, they are not very different from the 83 other ethical guidelines that researchers from the Health Ethics and Policy Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reviewed in an article published in Nature Machine Intelligence in September. However, one key aspect makes IEEE different from other think-tanks. With over 420,000 members, it is the world’s largest engineers’ association with roots reaching deep into Silicon Valley. Vint Cerf, one of Google’s Vice Presidents, is an IEEE “life fellow.”

Because the purpose of the IEEE principles is to serve as a “key reference for the work of technologists”, and because many technologists contributed to their conception, we wanted to know how three technology companies, Facebook, Google and Twitter, were planning to implement them.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril Additional research: Veronika Thiel

doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3484550

Dr. Stephan Dreyer is Senior Researcher, Johannes Schmees is Junior Researcher at the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut. This entry is based on a forthcoming and extensive article which came to being in the context of the interdisciplinary research project “Deciding about, by and together with ADM-Systems.”

Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and from 2017 has been a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In fall 2018 he was also a Visiting Professor at MIT. He jointly led, with Clemencia Rodriguez, the chapter on media and communications in the 22 chapter 2018 report of the International Panel on social Progress: www.ipsp.org. His latest books are The Costs of Connection and Media: Why It Matters (Polity: October 2019).

Ulises Ali Mejías is associate professor of Communication Studies and director of the Institute for Global Engagement at the State University of New York, College at Oswego. He is a media scholar whose work encompasses critical internet studies, network theory and science, philosophy and sociology of technology, and political economy of digital media. He is the author of Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and various articles including ‘Disinformation and the Media: The case of Russia and Ukraine’ in Media, Culture and Society (2017, with N. Vokuev), and ‘Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond’ in Fibreculture (2012). He is the principal investigator in the Algorithm Observatory project.

It was announced with some fanfare that Alexa and others would soon demonstrate breakthroughs in the field of emotion analysis. Much is written about affective computing, but products are far from market ready. For example, Amazon’s emotion assistant Dylan is said to be able to read human emotions just by listening to their voices. However, Dylan currently only exists in form of a patent.

So far, Amazon, Google et al. have not launched such products. Identifying unique signals that indicate that someone is sad seems to be a bit more complicated than they initially thought. Maybe someone’s voice sounds depressed because they are depressed, but maybe they are just tired or exhausted.

However, these difficulties do not prevent other companies from launching products that claim to have solved these complex problems by using voice and speech for character and personality analysis.

In Germany, two examples spring to mind. One is the company Precire, based in Aachen, a city on border with Belgium. Their idea: you record a voice sample, and based on the person’s choice of words, sentence structure and many other indicators, the software then produces an analysis of their character traits. The software can be used in staff recruitment or to identify candidates for promotion.

The company states that its software carries out the analysis based on a 15-minute language sample. The then CEO Mario Reis stated in an interview in 2016 that the results were based on science and scientifically tested. This statement is repeated in a book published in 2018. This book also cites additional studies and findings to further support the scientific grounding of the method.

By Veronika Thiel

Especially in connection with the last elections to the European Parliament, various forms of disinformation, propagated over social networks, played an important role. This is one of the major focusses of the publication. Online “trolls” work specifically on the weakening of individual persons or opinions, and are met on the other side by the defenders of democratic discourse. Additionally, the question arises as to what role private companies play in the struggle to uphold basic democratic values. And how can or should policymakers intervene to regulate this sector? When dealing with the conflicted field of information intermediaries, it is phenomena such as fake news, hate speech and filter bubbles that come to the fore.

In this paper, we also discuss the meaning and definition of the term information intermediary. Increasingly, algorithms automatically influence people’s everyday media realities. In particular, the data that social media and other services collect from their users plays a key role in shaping the information people receive in personalized news feeds or search engine results. 

In addition to these and related topics, this issue of the Research Monitor also deals with current research projects, for example on populism in social networks or on the difficulty of proving or disproving the existence of filter bubbles in social networks.

An upcoming event is also announced that will deal with the question of how news reaches users today and whether users come into contact with news items via social networks that otherwise would not have reached them.

You can download the entire issue of the Research Monitor here.

Christo Wilson's homepage here

Investigating the Impact of Gender on Rank in Resume by Le Chen, Ruijun Ma, Anikó Hannák and Christo Wilson

In his new book, Everyday Chaos, David Weinberger points to accepted ways we work on the Internet that in fact undo our old assumptions about how the future works: rather than attempting to anticipate what will happen and prepare for it, the Internet is training us to flourish by creating more and more unfathomable possibilities. The Net has also lowered the cost of operating without principles, hypotheses, or even hunches about what will work.

AI in the form of machine learning now is providing us with a model -- a model of models -- of how the future happens, with implications that range from how businesses make decisions to how we think about strategy, progress, explanations, morality, and even the nature of meaning itself.

These changes can be "metaphysically terrifying," Weinberger says, but ultimately are an evolutionary step of a Copernican magnitude.

About David

From the earliest days of the Web, David Weinberger has been a pioneering thought leader about the Internet’s effect on our lives, on our businesses, and most of all, on our ideas. He has contributed in a range of fields, from marketing to libraries to politics to journalism and more.

He has contributed in a remarkably wide range of ways as well: through books that explore the meaning of our new technology; as a writer for publications from Wiredand Scientific American to Harvard Business Review and even TV Guide; as an acclaimed keynote speaker around the world; a strategic marketing vice president and consultant; a teacher; an Internet adviser to presidential campaigns; an early social-networking entrepreneur; a strategic marketing consultant and VP; the codirector of the groundbreaking Harvard Library Innovation Lab; a writer-in-residence at a Google AI lab; a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy; a Franklin Fellow at the US State Department; and always a passionate advocate for an open internet.

About Joi

Joichi "Joi" Ito is an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and scholar focusing on the ethics and governance of technology, tackling complex problems such as climate change, societal inequity and redesigning the systems that support scholarship and science. As director of the MIT Media Lab and a Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences, he supports researchers at the Media Lab to deploy design, science, and technology such AI, cryptography, and synthetic biology to transform society in substantial and positive ways.

In this talk Amanda Askell - research scientist in ethics and policy at OpenAI - outlines the standard incentives to produce safe products: market incentives, liability law, and regulation. Askell argues that if these incentives are too weak because of information asymmetries or other factors, competitive pressure could cause firms to invest in safety below a level that is socially optimal.

In such circumstances, responsible AI development is a kind of collective action problem. Askell develops a conceptual framework to help identify levers to improve the prospects for cooperation in this kind of collective action problem.

German and European researchers have thus far dealt only tentatively with the topic of microtargeting in election campaigns. Most of the research projects and scientific papers on the subject are from the USA. Since Barack Obama’s election campaign in 2008 at the latest, it has become clear that both Democrats and Republicans in the US are employing massively data-driven processes in their election campaigns. In the paper State of Research: Microtargeting in Germany and Europe, we summarize the current expert debate on microtargeting in political communication, point to gaps in the research and provide suggestions on where new work is needed.

The paper was commissioned by the Landesanstalt für Medien NRW. The publication can be downloaded (German) free of charge from the Media Authority’s website and from our own.

In this talk, he draws upon a contentious exchange with Steve Jobs about the Democratic Republic of Congo to offer insights into how companies and civil society can work together on tough issues at the intersection of technology and human rights online.

David Sullivan, Director of Learning and Development at the Global Network Initiative, is joined in conversation with Berkman Klein Fellow, Chinmayi Arun.

Join us for a presentation by David Sullivan, Director of Learning and Development at the Global Network Initiative, followed by him in conversation with Berkman Klein Fellow, Chinmayi Arun

Kate Klonick is an Assistant Professor of Law at St. John's University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and New America. She holds a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Senior Editor at The Georgetown Law Journal and the Founding Editor of the The Georgetown Law Journal Online; and a PhD from Yale Law School where she studied under Jack Balkin, Tom Tyler, and Josh Knobe. Between law school and her time at Yale, she clerked for the Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit and the Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York.

Kate has a background in cognitive psychology which she applies to the study of emerging issues in law and technology. Specifically, this has included research and work on the Internet's effect on freedom of expression and private platform governance. She writes and works on issues related to online shaming, artificial intelligence, robotics, content moderation, algorithms, privacy, and intellectual property.

Her work on these topics has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Maryland Law Review, New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Guardian and numerous other publications. 

Thomas Kadri is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School, a Resident Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, and a Mellon Fellow. His research looks at the impact of networked technologies on criminal and tort law, with a particular focus on the constitutional implications of cybersecurity and content moderation on online platforms. He is currently working on an article about how platforms are using anti-hacking laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to police “public” parts of the internet. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the Maryland Law Review, the New York Times, and Slate. He is also an Adjunct Professor at New York Law School, where he teaches Cybercrime.

In the Global South and particularly under repressive regimes, these frameworks can be imposed with little regard for human rights obligations and without a full understanding of the technologies and processes they regulate or their implications for the preservation of the core values of the internet: interoperability, universality, and free expression and the free flow of information.

This panel brings together practitioners from five international organizations monitoring the development of legislation and case law related to cyberspace to discuss the implications for the future of human rights online.

Panelists

Moderator

Robert Faris is the research director at the Berkman Klein Center where he contributes and provides oversight to research at the center. His research includes the study of digital communication mechanisms by civil society organizations and social movements, and the emergence and impact of digitally-mediated collective action, as well as the influence of networked digital technologies on democracy and governance and the evolving role of new media in political change.

Dr. Hawley Johnson is the Project Manager for Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, an initiative to advance the understanding of international and national norms and institutions that best protect the free flow of information and expression in an interconnected global community. Hawley has over twelve years of experience in international media development both academically and professionally, with a focus on Eastern Europe. She recently worked with the award winning Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project to launch the Investigative Dashboard (ID), a joint effort with Google Ideas offering specialized databases and research tools for journalists in emerging democracies.

Robert Muthuri is currently a Research Fellow – ICT at the Centre for IP and IT (CIPIT) at the Strathmore School of Law. He is a Legal Knowledge Engineer working at the intersection of legal theory and AI. Robert is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya who, with the conviction that technology had a lot more to offer the legal domain, further pursued a career in legal informatics.

Juan Carlos Lara is a Chilean lawyer, specializing in law and technology, currently working as the manager of the Public Policy and Research team at Derechos Digitales, a non governmental organisation based in Santiago de Chile that promotes and defends digital rights in Latin America. He has worked as a consultant in intellectual property for public and private entities, has been a research assistant at the Centre of Studies in Cyber Law at the University of Chile, and is currently an LL.M. candidate at UC Berkeley. In Derechos Digitales, he leads research and policy analysis on technology and data privacy, equality, freedom of expression, and access to knowledge and human rights in online platforms.

Gayatri Khandhadai is a lawyer with a background in international law and human rights, international and regional human rights mechanisms, research, and advocacy. She previously worked with national and regional human rights groups, focusing on freedom of expression. She coordinated the IMPACT — India, Malaysia, Pakistan Advocacy for Change through Technology — project with the Association for Progressive Communications. Her current focus is on digital rights in Asia with specific emphasis on freedoms of expression, assembly, and association on the Internet.

Jessica Dheere is co-founder of the Beirut–based digital rights research, training, and advocacy organization SMEX (smex.org) and a 2018-19 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She is also incubating director of the recently launched CYRILLA Collaborative (cyrilla.org), a global initiative that maps and analyzes the emergence and evolution of legal frameworks in digitally networked environments through open research, data models, and databases.

Referentin: Prof. Dr. Katharina Zweig, TU Kaiserslautern

1. Community Standards

2. Proactively Identifying Harmful Content

3. Discouraging Borderline Content

4. Giving People Control and Allowing More Content

5. Addressing Algorithmic Bias

6. Building an Appeals Process

7. Independent Governance and Oversight

8. Creating Transparency and Enabling Research

9. Working Together on Regulation

...

Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment.

Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001), and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). He also co-edited (with Carolyn Thomas) the collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (2007). Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including The New York Times, Bloomberg View, American Scholar, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, BookForum, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post, The Guardian, Esquire.com, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The Nation.

In order for research and development of fully automated vehicles to continue in Germany, the acceptance of potential users of automated vehicles is crucial. As part of the iKoPA research initiative, a simulator for the virtual testing of automated driving is being developed with which users can experience various driving scenarios in a realistic car cockpit. As in a real automated vehicle, the steering wheel turns on its own in the simulator, while the user sees a virtual journey through a 3D world, projected onto a large screen. Various driving scenarios can be simulated, such as an undisturbed drive without other road users under ideal conditions. However, it is also possible to simulate complex traffic situations in which user intervention is necessary to prevent a collision with sudden obstacles. In addition, system errors such as unexpected rapid increases in speed, close driving due to sensor inaccuracies or hacker attacks can also be simulated.

The event will be combined with the local award ceremony of the EU Prize for Cultural Heritage/Europa Nostra Award 2018, with which Fraunhofer IGD is being recognized this year for its CultLab3D project. The CultLab3D team has already been celebrating since June 22, when their project was honored in the official ceremony during the European Cultural Heritage Summit in Berlin: the European Commission and Europa Nostra honored 29 winners from 17 countries for their outstanding achievements in preservation, research, volunteering, education, training, and raising awareness. CultLab3D was among the winners of the prize in the Research category. Critical to this success is the forward-looking technology, which automatically produces 3D scans in the highest resolution – with unprecedented speed.

Current ethical debates about the consequences of automation generally focus on the rights of individuals. However, algorithmic processes – the major component of automated systems – exhibit a collective dimension first and foremost. This can only be addressed partially at the level of individual rights. For this reason, existing ethical and legal criteria are not suitable (or, at least, are inadequate) when considering algorithms generally. They lead to a conceptual blurring with regard to issues such as privacy and discrimination, when information that could potentially be misused to discriminate illegitimately is declared private. Our aim in the present article is, first, to bring a measure of clarity to the debate so that such blurring can be avoided in the future. In addition to this, we discuss ethical criteria for technology which, in the form of universal abstract principles, are to be applied to all societal contexts.

For example, potential reviewers belong to Facebook groups (often with names like “deals” to obscure their true purpose) in which they can be contacted by sellers. Sellers offer them a free product, or sometimes even pay, in exchange for positive product reviews. In order to not draw attention to these incentivized reviews—which have already been banned—sellers instruct reviewers to do things like add similar products to their wish lists, and pay upfront, but accept reimbursement via PayPal at a later date. They also seek out reviewers with long-term Amazon accounts, as this adds credibility to their reviews.

Renee DiResta is the Director of Research at New Knowledge, and Head of Policy at nonprofit Data for Democracy. Renee investigates the spread of disinformation and manipulated narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem.

Linked Data has the potential to revolutionize the way we discover, access, integrate, and use data; just in the way the World Wide Web has revolutionized the way we consume and connect documents.

This course will introduce you to the basic principles and technologies of Linked Data to enable data sharing and reuse on a massive scale. Held together by ontologies, i.e. knowledge representations based on Semantic Web technologies, Linked Data serves as the central building block of the emerging Web of Data.

Shoshana Zuboff is a social scientist and author of three books, each of which has been recognised as the definitive signal of a new epoch in technological society. Her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism reveals a world in which technology users are no longer customers but the raw material for an entirely new economic system. Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School from 2014 until 2016.