Summer Newsletter 2023

Honors/Awards

The Graduate School recognized Bryan Semaan (INFO faculty) with a 2023 Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. A total of sixteen faculty were recognized for their contributions mentoring graduate students and supporting the mission of graduate education.

Julia Foley (INFO BS recipient) won the Department of Information Science’s William W. White Outstanding Senior award, which recognizes one student in each CMCI department for excellence in academic merit, professional achievement and service to the college. 

INFO in the News

• Casey Fiesler (INFO faculty) published an article for The Conversation titled: AI has social consequences, but who pays the price? Tech companies’ problem with ‘ethical debt’. 
•  
• Casey Fiesler also published an op-ed for Slate titled: Congress Doesn't Understand Something Big About TikTok.          

Faculty Update

•  
• We enthusiastically welcome Evan Peck to our faculty! Evan will begin in the fall of 2023.
•  
• Casey Fiesler (INFO Faculty) will be a non-residential visiting fellow with the IBM-Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab during her AY 2023/2024 sabbatical, where she will focus on science communication and making tech ethics content more accessible with content across YouTube, TikTok, and more.      

Postdoctoral News

Morgan Scheuerman, newly awarded PhD recipient, has joined the Information Science Department as a postdoctoral associate with faculty member, Jed Brubaker, in the Identity Lab. Welcome, Morgan!

Michael Ann DeVito, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Identity Lab, will be starting as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Communication Studies at Northeastern University this fall, where she will be building a new social computing lab focused on community-based approaches to fair AI/ML and queer/trans HCI.

Invited Talks

• Casey Fiesler (INFO faculty) was an invited speaker for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science's Science at the Edge speaker series, on the topic: The AI revolution and misinformation.
•  
• Casey Fiesler was a keynote speaker at the inaugural Tech Ethics Exchange Northeast conference at Harvard University, with a talk titled: Doing Computer Science: A Broader Perspective on Tech Ethics Education.  
•  

Summer Workshops

• Robin Burke (INFO faculty, chair) was among the 16 international faculty and researchers presenting at the Recommender Systems Summer School in Copenhagen June 12-16, where PhD students and others gathered for in-depth sessions on a variety of recommender systems topics. Burke presented on multistakeholder recommender systems and also offered thoughts on current controversies around personalization and its social impact in a session devote to the future of the field.  
•        
• The 2023 Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST) Summer Research Institute from June 26-30 at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colorado was organized by INFO faculty members, Amy and Stephen Voida. This institute, with a mentor-early career scholar model, engaged participants in peer networking, roundtable discussions of individual and group research interests, and skill-building tutorials that identified substantive ways that the theories, approaches, and tools within the larger community can advance their work with the design and study of sociotechnical systems.

Conferences

Ricarose Roque (INFO faculty) and Ronni Hayden (ATLAS PhD student) presented at the International Society of the Learning Sciences conference (ISLS) 2023 in Montreal this June. Hayden presented their paper titled: Expanding and Focusing Infrastructuring Analysis for Informal Stem Education, on behalf of co-authors Roque and Stephanie Hladik (former INFO postdoc). Roque presented their paper titled: “They Are Whole People”: Consequential Transitions for Pre-Service Teachers Participating in a Family Creative Computing Program, on behalf of co-authors Melissa Braaten, Elizabeth Tetu and Hayden.  

ACM FAccT conference 2023

• Casey Fiesler (INFO faculty) has published a new paper at the FAccT 2023 conference led by collaborators at University of Minnesota, titled: Systematic Review of Ethics Disclosures in Predictive Mental Health Research (Ajmani et al).       
•  
• Janet Ruppert (INFO PhD recipient) presented a CRAFT session of the Drag vs. AI workshop at the ACM FAccT conference, with co-authors Joy Buolamwini and José Ramón Lizárraga (CU, S. Ed., INFO affiliate faculty) from the Algorithmic Justice League.     
•  
• Jessie J. Smith (INFO PhD student) presented a paper talk at the FAccT 2023 conference for the accepted research paper: The Many Faces of Fairness: Exploring the Institutional Logics of Multistakeholder Microlending Recommendation, presented on behalf of her co-first author Anas Buhayh (INFO PhD student), and other co-authors: Anushka Kathait (CU CS), Pradeep Ragothaman (Kiva), Nicholas Mattei (Tulane), Robin Burke (INFO faculty), and Amy Voida (INFO faculty).     

Upcoming Conference News

The 26th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW 2023)

CSCW Workshops

• A workshop on Indigeneity will be presented at CSCW, led by Dipto Das (INFO PhD student) and colleagues, Parboti Roy (University of British Columbia), Carlos Toxtli (Clemson University), Kagonya Awori (Microsoft Africa Research Institute), Morgan Vigil-Hayes (Northern Arizona University), Monojit Choudhury (Microsoft Research Lab India), Neha Kumar (Georgia Tech), Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (University of Toronto), Bryan Semaan (INFO faculty). There has been little effort in conceptualizing indigeneity in social computing, despite the concept being central to decolonial and postcolonial perspectives, which scholars have been increasingly using in computing research for over a decade. It is crucial to reflect on who can be considered indigenous in the spirit of inclusion and reclamation since the underdevelopment of this concept and the nuances, differences, relationships, and overlaps between indigeneity and colonial marginalization may silence different populations in research. The workshop aims to bring together scholars whose works are associated with different local and indigenous cultures and their technology practices and experiences to initiate conversations around three themes: (a) defining indigeneity and identifying indigenous communities in social computing, (b) recognition in different sociopolitical contexts, and (c) contributions to social computing. 
•  
• A workshop on Ethical Pluralism was accepted at CSCW, led by Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat (University of Toronto), Ayesha Bhimdiwala (University of Texas at Austin), Ananya Bhattacharjee (University of Toronto), Amna Batool (University of Michigan), Dipto Das (INFO PhD student), Nusrat Jahan Mim (Harvard University), Abdullah Hasan Safir (University of Warwick), Sharifa Sultana (Cornell University), Taslima Akter (University of California Irvine), C. Estelle Smith (former INFO postdoc, Colorado School of Mines), Bryan Semaan (INFO faculty), Shaimaa Lazem (City of Scientific Research and Technology Applications), Robert Soden (University of Toronto), Michael Muller (IBM Research), Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (University of Toronto).
• Although CSCW has shown a strong interest in diversity and inclusion, the literature predominantly reflects ethics rooted in Western universalism, modernism, scientism, and Euro-centrism. Consequently, CSCW theories and practices tend to marginalize millions of people worldwide whose ethical perspectives do not align with the narrow focus of ethics and values within CSCW. In an effort to embrace ethical pluralism within CSCW, we propose a day-long hybrid workshop in CSCW and invite researchers and practitioners to initiate conversations centered around three themes: (a) foregrounding ethical diversities, (b) adapting diverse ethics, and (c) addressing challenges, barriers, and limitations associated with incorporating plural ethics into CSCW. Through this workshop, we aim to bring together CSCW scholars and practitioners, fostering a community that advocates for and advances the cause of pluralism in socio-technical systems.         
•  
• Dipto Das (INFO PhD student) was accepted at the Doctoral Consortium. His doctoral research contributes to understanding how colonialism marginalized people in the Global South across various dimensions of identity (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, religion, caste, nationality), how sociotechnical systems reinstate colonial structures and values, and how computing platforms both support and impede colonially marginalized communities' identity expression and performances. Building on decolonial and postcolonial perspectives with a historicist sensibility, my mixed-method empirical studies on various sites (e.g., Quora, YouTube) highlight users' agency, the role of content moderation, algorithms, and online communities in the inclusion of culturally diverse native Bengali identities. In doing so, my work informs the broader social computing literature on identity, content moderation, fairness and bias, social justice, and ICTD.
•  
• Matt Nicholson (INFO PhD student), Brian Keegan (INFO faculty) and Casey Fiesler (INFO faculty) had a poster, titled: Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances accepted to CSCW 2023. The work explores the governance in the emerging, federated social media landscape by comparing rules with Mastodon and Reddit subcommunities. Through this work, the authors call for the development of additional instance-level governance and technical scaffolding, and raise questions for future work into the development, values and value tensions present in the broader federated social networking landscape.
•  
•  

Grants and Awards

• Brian Keegan (INFO Faculty) and Laurie Jones (INFO PhD student) recently won a $38,457 grant from the Wikimedia foundation. Their proposal, titled Network perspectives on collective memory processes across the Arabic and English Wikipedias, focuses on the 2011 Arab Spring. Using natural language processing, network analysis and causal inference Keegan’s team will analyze how articles on this conflict have revised and changed comparatively across English and Arabic languages.
•  
• Andrew Schwartz (INFO undergraduate student, student research assistant) is collaborating with researchers at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid (UCM) on analysis of governance of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). He is also working with a cohort of researchers to understand how the Dobbs Supreme Court decision influenced abortion-related Google search results. Andrew's work is funded by the CUB Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, the Benson Center, and the UCM.