Our Tech, Our Campus UX Workshop
January 17, 2020, at 2-4 pm in Redwood Room, Geisel Library
Real-Time Research Designed to Get the Public Back in Public Health by John Ayers (UC San Diego)
January 22, 2020, at 4 pm in Room 1201, Computer Science and Engineering Building
There is now an abundance of passively generated big data — encompassing digital footprints left on electronic devices and online (including search engines, social networking sites, mobile devices, websites, etc.) — that can be analyzed to yield instantaneous health insights. Yet, the full potential of these data will not be realized because the research enterprise that governs what public health research is prioritized needs to catch up to advances in data availability and data science. In this talk a framework for the future of public health research designed around real time insights will be presented.
Hosted by The Design Lab at UCSD
Pulse of GIS at UC San Diego
January 31, 2020, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm in the Seuss Room, Geisel Library
The purpose of this meeting is to bring together those using GIS or applying geospatial concepts to their work. This is also a time to find out:
– Who’s doing what with GIS across UCSD?
– Hear presentations about projects using GIS (5-10 min each).
– Projects can be: exploration, in process, or mature
– New geospatial resources.
– Share a problem or issue you have to see if others have ideas / solutions.
This event is open to all students, academics and staff affiliated with UC San Diego.
Future meetings will be held at other locations around campus. Stay informed with future events and locations by signing up for the GIS @ UCSD listserv.
Coffee and snacks will be available. Stop by for any portion of the meeting.
Cultured Data Symposium
February 7, 2020 – February 8, 2020
The purpose of this meeting is to bring together those using GIS or applying geospatial concepts to their work. This is also a time to find out:
– Who’s doing what with GIS across UCSD?
– Hear presentations about projects using GIS (5-10 min each).
– Projects can be: exploration, in process, or mature
– New geospatial resources.
– Share a problem or issue you have to see if others have ideas / solutions.
How can data science and the arts and humanities learn from one another? The growing digitization of the cultural record and the explosion of new data generation, collection, and analysis practices create a new state of cultured data: culture as data, and data as a driver of culture.
The Cultured Data Symposium will address how analytic techniques can unveil new understandings of culture and how the proliferation of data in everyday life changes how culture is produced, distributed, and influenced.
The two-day symposium will consist of four panels per day, each focused on one intersection of data science and the arts and humanities. Each panel will have four speakers drawn from academia, industry, and the arts, giving attendees a well-rounded viewpoint on the topic. Detailed schedule available here.
Day 1 | Friday, February 7 | 1-7 PM | Qualcomm Institute
The first day of the symposium will be held at the Qualcomm Institute on campus with a related arts exhibition, STREAMING, which explores networked culture streams and their ecological and social costs.
Day 2 | Saturday, February 8 | 8:30 AM-7 PM | Bread & Salt Warehouse
The second day will be hosted at Bread & Salt, a popular arts warehouse in Barrio Logan, and will conclude with evening performances.
All events are free and open to students, faculty, staff and the general public—registration required. Attendees are encouraged to share their thoughts about this programming on social media using #CulturedData.
The Cultured Data Symposium is made possible by generous support from the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, UC San Diego Library, Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, Division of Arts and Humanities, Institute of Arts and Humanities, and the Department of Visual Arts.
Film Screening: A Film on Design, Technology, and Research (DTR) by Haoqi Zhang (Northwestern University)
February 12, 2020, at 4 pm in Room 1201, Computer Science and Engineering Building
In this Design@Large seminar, we’ll be screening a documentary following Northwestern University’s Design, Technology, and Research (DTR) program led by associate professor Haoqi Zhang. The film follows graduate and undergraduate students and their faculty mentor in DTR for two quarters, to look at the practices of a community-based research lab. Students self-direct their own research projects focused on design within human computer interaction while also learning about their own work process and metacognitive blockers to completing their work. The film focuses on the process by which mentors instruct multiple students at once and how students work to overcome individual struggles that prevent them from moving forward to make project progress and grow as people. Students work individually but within a community to find ways to seek help from each other, learn from others’ experiences, and support one another. By reflecting on their own practices and work processes, students grow personally throughout their time in this community. The ultimate goal of DTR is for students to discover what it’s like to pursue work that is meaningful to their own values and goals.
Hosted by The Design Lab at UCSD
Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma with Amit Pinchevski
February 19, 2020, at 5-7 pm in Geisel Library, Seuss Room
In his new book Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Drawing on a number of case studies such as radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial, videotapes of Holocaust survivor testimonies, and the recent use of digital platforms for holographic witnessing, he demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds the traumatic condition itself. His insights have crucial implications for media studies and the digital humanities field as they provide new ways to understand the relationship between technology and human suffering. Pinchevski is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
With support from UC San Diego’s Department of Communication
PREVIOUS EVENTS
Accidents Happen: The Ontological Difference in Statistics and Algorithmics by John Cheney-Lippold
October 14, 2019, from 12:15p – 1:45p in Room 3005, Humanities & Social Sciences Building.
Catherine Malabou writes of the accident as an “explosive transformation,” the becoming of “someone else, an absolute other, someone who will never be reconciled with them selves again.”
In this talk, I will explore several instances of what we can call “accidental transformations”— the use of statistics to invalidate the signature of a multimillion dollar will, the use of statistics to objectify racial categories in the case of People vs. Collins, and the accidental algorithmics that led to the lethal collision of a Tesla autonomous driving vehicle—to demonstrate how statistics and algorithms are fundamentally transformative, resulting in the production of an epistemic other, a “someone else” that escapes our own metaphysical assumptions. This escape forces us to take into account the accidental nature of statistics and algorithmics, the ontological incommensurability between our world, a world of perception, and its statistical/algorithmic cousin, a world of calculation. Ultimately, this lecture will aim to productively reorient many of the pressing questions and debates being had in terms of algorithmic bias, ethics, and ideas of justice.
Hosted by the The Science Studies Colloquium Series
Talking to a Toaster: On noticing the opening-with-the-word in everyday interactions with digital voice assistants by Prof Morana Alac
October 28, 2019, from 12:15p-1:45p in Room 3027, Humanities & Social Sciences Building
Discussions of the problematic relationship between AI and society have recently only heightened. These discussions, nevertheless, remain partial until they take into account how we live AI technologies in unremarkable circumstances of our everyday. In arguing for the importance of such a noticing, this talk centers on pedagogical efforts toward practicing it in the context of the internet-of-things and associated digital voice assistants (DVAs). Designed as conversation-oriented devices, DVAs strongly manifest their incompleteness in that they need other voices. Paying attention to that orientation at an embodied scale of analysis brings up our involvement in an interactional production, while it also manifests its reciprocal character. This resists the return to the individual that more often transpires from the discussions of the problematic relationship between AI and society, and to think through it, I engage distributed cognition and extended mind hypothesis. However, in directing the focus on a conjoint involvement in talk across human-nonhuman divide, I suggest not only going beyond psychological explanations, but also beyond instrumentalist reasoning that conceives of these machines as primarily convenient tools that can extend our cognition. Tracing the achieved quality of bodies and environments—two constitutive elements of DVA technology—points out just how the self in the context of the voiced AI importantly derives from openings between humans and machines in interactional scenes they are a part of, while it also articulates the noticing of these openings as an engaged act.
Hosted by the The Science Studies Colloquium Series
Making Markets: Stories of Technologies, Knowledge, and Invisibility by Prof Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra
November 4, 2019, from 12:15p-1:45p in Room 3027, Humanities & Social Sciences Building
In this talk, I will address the question of how markets come to happen. As I will argue, markets emerge not only through propensities to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’ but also through the invisible work of sociotechnical agents that make the devices of transactions possible. I will illustrate this with two cases. The first concerns the automation of the London Stock Exchange, characterized by the work of lowly engineers that, with time, sweat, and persistence, transformed the way finance was done in Britain. The second case concerns a market we know all too well: the market for academic labor. By exploring how market-like devices have reshaped the British social scientists, I will highlight how willful ignorance and vocational calls contribute to the marketization of knowledge, academia, and our professional souls.
Hosted by the The Science Studies Colloquium Series
The Digital Revolution: The Potential Promise and Ethical Perils in Research by Prof Camille Nebeker Ed. D., M.S.
November 13, 2019, at 4 pm in Room 1201, Computer Science and Engineering Building
Digital tools including apps, wearable sensors, and social network platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for research. However, this rapidly evolving landscape is outpacing existing regulatory structures for protecting research participants. In addition, new actors in the scientific community, including technology companies and citizen scientists are not bound by the rules used by traditional academic researchers to guide responsible and ethical research. Dr. Nebeker will describe how technologies are being leveraged to capture personal health data for research drawing attention to nuanced technical and ethical aspects that require careful consideration during the study design phase. She will underscore the important role of funding agencies, policymakers, editors, researchers and ethicists in creating the infrastructure necessary to allow digital health research to flourish.
Hosted by The Design Lab at UCSD
The Augmented Reality of Modernity: A Pepper’s Ghost Story by Thomas Connor PhD Candidate
November 18, 2019, from 12:15p-1:45p in Room 3027, Humanities & Social Sciences Building
Since the digital resurrection of Tupac Shakur at a 2012 music festival, other deceased pop stars (e.g., Roy Orbison, Ronnie James Dio, Whitney Houston) have returned to concert stages. These events are multimedia social spectacles framed with futuristic discourses implying that they are “new” media, yet the technology producing each of them is a barely altered form of a 19th-century stage illusion called Pepper’s Ghost. Based on a simple optical illusion, Pepper’s Ghost was presented theatrically throughout Europe and the United States in the mid-1800s, often to public sensation. But it was not originally invented for narrative entertainment or even spiritualist séances. Its namesake, John Henry Pepper, was a chemist and a popular lecturer at a London science museum, the Royal Polytechnic Institution, where he developed the ghost illusion to proselytize for a particular strain of European modernity. Pepper’s goal was not to summon a ghost but to reveal that image as the product of superior science.
In this talk, I historicize the development and usage of Pepper’s Ghost as a boundary object—an object liminally situated between science and entertainment, amusement and instruction, and rational inquiry and superstition—in order to demonstrate how this techno-spiritualist spectacle supported the Polytechnic’s ideological programming. I will consider how the 21st-century revival of the illusion continues to promote discourses of technoscientific superiority over not only life but death. I will conclude by reflecting on the benefits of connecting media and cultural studies to STS perspectives.
Hosted by the The Science Studies Colloquium Series
UC San Diego Software Carpentry Introduction to Python
2-Day Workshop
November 19-20, 2019 from 9:00am-4:30pm in Classroom 4, UCSD Biomedial Library Building
Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.
Gain efficiency and working knowledge to use the common tools for scripting, task automation, testing, debugging and version control. (Lessons will cover Introduction to the following tools: Unix Shell, Git, Python using Jupyter Notebook)
Human Robot Teaming in Healthcare by Prof Laurel Riek
November 20, 2019, at 4 pm in Room 1201, Computer Science and Engineering Building
As society ages and population healthcare needs increase globally, many are looking to robots as a means to help fill care gaps and support the independence of individuals across their lifespans. To work alongside people, particularly at their most vulnerable, robots need to dynamically and quickly interpret human activities, understand context, and engage in appropriate, safe, and useful actions. They need to learn from and adapt to people long term, who themselves may experiences changes in their abilities. Finally, they need to be well-designed with key community stakeholders so that they are broadly usable and accessible. My research focuses on building robots that can adaptively team with people in safety critical environments, such as hospitals and homes, and personalize and tailor their behavior. We are exploring new research directions in perception, coordination dynamics, and long term learning. Our primary application focus is healthcare, with recent work in neurorehabilitation, dementia caregiving, and community health. This talk will describe several of our recent projects in this space.
Hosted by The Design Lab at UCSD
Does AI really understand the language or only uses it? by Inez Okulska PhD
November 20, 2019, from 2:00p-3:30p in the auditorium, San Diego Supercomputer Center
As society ages and population healthcare needs increase globally, many are looking to robots as a means to help fill care gaps and support the independence of individuals across their lifespans. To work alongside people, particularly at their most vulnerable, robots need to dynamically and quickly interpret human activities, understand context, and engage in appropriate, safe, and useful actions. They need to learn from and adapt to people long term, who themselves may experiences changes in their abilities. Finally, they need to be well-designed with key community stakeholders so that they are broadly usable and accessible. My research focuses on building robots that can adaptively team with people in safety critical environments, such as hospitals and homes, and personalize and tailor their behavior. We are exploring new research directions in perception, coordination dynamics, and long term learning. Our primary application focus is healthcare, with recent work in neurorehabilitation, dementia caregiving, and community health. This talk will describe several of our recent projects in this space.
Hosted by the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute
Pulse of GIS at UC San Diego
November 22, 2019 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm in the Seuss Room, Geisel Library
The purpose of this meeting is to bring together those using GIS or applying geospatial concepts to their work. This is also a time to find out:
– Who’s doing what with GIS across UCSD?
– Hear presentations about projects using GIS (5-10 min each).
– Projects can be: exploration, in process, or mature
– New geospatial resources.
– Share a problem or issue you have to see if others have ideas / solutions.
This event is open to all students, academics and staff affiliated with UC San Diego.
Future meetings will be held at other locations around campus. Stay informed with future events and locations by signing up for the GIS @ UCSD listserv.
Coffee and snacks will be available. Stop by for any portion of the meeting.
My Future as a Bond Villain: The Evil Things AI + Social Media Can Do and How To Stop It
November 25, 2019, from 11:00 am – 12:00 pm in Room 1201, Computer Science and Engineering Building
Online sharing combined with opaque mass surveillance and powerful analytic tools has led us to a place where data is collected and transformed into incredibly personal insights, often without users’ knowledge or consent. This impacts the information they see, the way they interact, and it can be used in deeply manipulative ways. This talk will look at users’ feelings about these practices and how they tie back to classic sociological understandings of trust, power, and privacy.
Hosted by the CSE Colloquium and Distinguished Lecture Series, 2019-2020
What is Media Manipulation? by Joan Donovan Director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project 2019
December 2, 2019, from 12:15p-1:45p in Room 3027, Humanities & Social Sciences Building
Journalists face a barrage of information and they must make choices about which stories to cover based on available source materials. Some stories, though, are just that, stories. Our research maps and tracks attempts by “media manipulators” to influence journalists and bait them into picking up false stories. During breaking news events, media manipulators act quickly to establish their narratives by creating and seeding content in order to trick journalists into covering specific highly politicized wedge issues. Manipulators often rely on the speed and ubiquity of social media, which has quickened the pace of news, to make wide scale distribution of polarizing hoaxes possible. Manipulation campaigns are planned and executed across multiple platforms online simultaneously in an effort to capture a wide audience of both everyday users and to ensnare journalists. Broadly, we refer to these tactics as “source hacking,” a versatile set of techniques for feeding false information to journalists, investigators, and the general public during breaking news events or across highly polarized wedge issues. In this paper, we examine four different methods of “source hacking” and show how media manipulators rely on the specific affordances of sociotechnical platforms to surface false information and consequently sway and/or set media agendas. While most journalists are trained to spot savvy public relations, promotional content, and to avoid publishing propaganda, in this networked media environment, hoaxes assume new forms and often mask themselves as social movements. In order for journalists to effectively spot and debunk these hoaxes, theory and methods for addressing source hacking must be developed and widely disseminated across journalism schools and newsrooms.
Hosted by the The Science Studies Colloquium Series
Fundamentals of Text Mining: Curating, Preparing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Textual Data
December 5, 2019, from 2- 4 pm in Dunst Classroom, Geisel Library
As society ages and population healthcare needs increase globally, many are looking to robots as a means to help fill care gaps and support the independence of individuals across their lifespans. To work alongside people, particularly at their most vulnerable, robots need to dynamically and quickly interpret human activities, understand context, and engage in appropriate, safe, and useful actions. They need to learn from and adapt to people long term, who themselves may experiences changes in their abilities. Finally, they need to be well-designed with key community stakeholders so that they are broadly usable and accessible. My research focuses on building robots that can adaptively team with people in safety critical environments, such as hospitals and homes, and personalize and tailor their behavior. We are exploring new research directions in perception, coordination dynamics, and long term learning. Our primary application focus is healthcare, with recent work in neurorehabilitation, dementia caregiving, and community health. This talk will describe several of our recent projects in this space.
The relationship between close reading, mid-range reading (Alison Booth, “Mid-Range Reading: Not a Manifesto,” 2017), and distant reading (Franco Moretti, “Distant Reading,” 2013) has expanded the scholarly potential of both literary studies and the social sciences.
The purpose of this workshop is to familiarize attendees with the basic workflow, terms and output a student or new researcher would encounter when undertaking a text mining project. We will give an introduction to text mining, including what it is, what’s possible, and how it is being used for research and instruction. In addition to a discussion on the theories and methodologies in the field, participants will get hands-on practice with the major components of a text mining project using the Gale Digital Scholar Lab.
The Digital Scholar Lab gives users the ability to search across their library’s Gale Primary Sources holdings and select documents to be added to their custom content sets. They can then clean the data, perform text analyses using any of the six tools for text mining in the platform, and export visualizations, tabular data and up to 1000 documents of OCR text.
Computers will be provided to participants for this workshop. However, you will also have the opportunity to bring and work on your own computer.
This workshop is open to UC San Diego affiliates only, and registration is required.