Abstract:

Considerable scholarship has established that algorithms are an increasingly important part of what information people encounter in everyday life. Much less work has focused on studying users’ experiences with, understandings of, and attitudes about how algorithms may influence what they see and do. The dearth of research on this topic may be in part due to the difficulty in studying a subject about which there is no known ground truth given that details about algorithms are proprietary and rarely made public. In this talk, I will report on the methodological challenges of studying people’s algorithm skills based on 83 in-person interviews conducted in five countries. I will also discuss the types of algorithm skills identified from our data. The talk will advocate for more such scholarship to accompany existing system-level analyses of algorithms’ social implications and offers a blue print for how to do this.

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Eszter Hargittai is Professor and Chair of Internet Use and Society at the Institute of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich. Previously, she was the Delaney Family Professor in the Communication Studies Department at Northwestern University. In 2019, she was elected Fellow of the International Communication Association and also received the William F. Ogburn Mid-Career Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association’s section on Communication, Information Technology and Media Sociology. For over two decades, she has been researching people’s Internet uses and skills, and how these relate to questions of social inequality.

CISAC will be canceling all public events and seminars until at least April 5th due to the ongoing developments associated with COVID-19.

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About this Event: Just a few years ago, people spoke of the US as a hyperpower-a titan stalking the world stage with more relative power than any empire in history. Yet as early as 1993, newly-appointed CIA director James Woolsey pointed out that although Western powers had "slain a large dragon" by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they now faced a "bewildering variety of poisonous snakes."

In The Dragons and the Snakes, the eminent soldier-scholar David Kilcullen asks how, and what, opponents of the West have learned during the last quarter-century of conflict. Applying a combination of evolutionary theory and detailed field observation, he explains what happened to the "snakes"-non-state threats including terrorists and guerrillas-and the "dragons"-state-based competitors such as Russia and China. He explores how enemies learn under conditions of conflict, and examines how Western dominance over a very particular, narrowly-defined form of warfare since the Cold War has created a fitness landscape that forces adversaries to adapt in ways that present serious new challenges to America and its allies. Within the world's contemporary conflict zones, Kilcullen argues, state and non-state threats have increasingly come to resemble each other, with states adopting non-state techniques and non-state actors now able to access levels of precision and lethal weapon systems once only available to governments.

A counterintuitive look at this new, vastly more complex environment, The Dragons and the Snakes will not only reshape our understanding of the West's enemies' capabilities, but will also show how we can respond given the increasing limits on US power.

About the Speaker: 

David Kilcullen is a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales and a professor of practice in global security at Arizona State University. He heads the strategic research firm Cordillera Applications Group. A former soldier and diplomat, he served as a counterinsurgency advisor during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years he has supported aid agencies, non-government organizations, and local communities in conflict and disaster-affected regions, and developed new ways to think about highly networked urban environments. Dr. Kilcullen was named one of the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009 and is the author of the highly acclaimed The Accidental Guerrilla, Out of the Mountains, and Blood Year.

Livestream: Registration is required and will close 24 hours before the event. Click here to register.

This event is available only to CISAC faculty, fellows, staff, and honors students.

About this Event: Jeopardizing U.S. research enterprises, provoking regional nationalism, and building a technological panopticon to rate every citizen's behavior: these assumptions about China fuel US foreign policy shadow-boxing with misplaced concerns. Our panel challenges prevalent narratives on China, providing informed, nuanced investigations that cut across a range of research methods. Julien de Troullioud's argues that the rise of China in science and technology is not a threat to the US but instead an opportunity to jointly work to solve global issues. Data shows that the current policies to protect the US research enterprise in science is hurting American and international scientific research. Xinru Ma finds that nationalism in China and in Southeast Asia are not necessarily all anti-foreign, and is more of a liability rather than an asset for domestic regimes, according to evidences from formal modeling and social media data. Shazeda Ahmed's interviews with Chinese government officials, tech firm representatives, and legal scholars reveal that the Chinese social credit system is more limited in its data collection and fragmented in its on-the-ground implementation than the dystopic institution its foreign critics presume it to be. Our research presents new data and fresh perspectives for rethinking US-China dynamics.

About the Speakers:

Shazeda Ahmed is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley who researches how tech firms and the Chinese government are collaboratively constructing the country's social credit system. She will be joining CISAC and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in Fall 2019 as a pre-doctoral Fellow. Shazeda has worked as a researcher for the Citizen Lab, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, and the Ranking Digital Rights corporate transparency review by New America. In the 2018-19 academic year she was a Fulbright fellow at Peking University's law school.

Xinru Ma is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Political Science and International Relations (POIR) program at University of Southern California, and will join CISAC as a Postdoctoral Fellow for 2019-2020. Originally from China, Xinru is interested in combining formal modeling and computational social science with research on nationalist protests and maritime disputes, with a regional focus on East and Southeast Asia. Her research is informed by extensive field research in Vietnam, Philippines and China, during which she interviewed protestors, think tanks, diplomats, government officials, and foreign business owners that were impacted by nationalist protests. In addition to informing her of the complicated strategic interaction between mass mobilization, government repression and foreign policy-making, the field research further motivated her to focus on the methodological challenges for causal inference that stem from strategic conflict behavior. More broadly, Xinru is interested in public opinion and new methods of measuring it, foreign policy formation, alliance politics, East Asian security dynamics, and the historical relations of East Asia. 

Julien de Troullioud de Lanversin will be joining CISAC as a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow. Julien is finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He is interested in how to verify and reconstruct past fissile material production programs with scientific tools. To that end, he developed innovative methods that use isotopic analysis from nuclear reactors to gain information on their past operation (nuclear archeology) and designed an open source software that can compute the istopic composition of fissile materials from nuclear reactors. His current research looks at the various modalities of the production of plutonium and tritium in production reactors and how transparency on tritium could be used to improve estimates on plutonium stockpiles. Julien also studies security questions related to civil and military nuclear programs in Northeast Asia through the lens of fissile material, with a focus on China and North Korea. Julien visited the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technologies at Tsinghua University for one semester in 2018 to collaborate with Chinese experts on work related to nuclear engineering and arms control. Julien’s work on nuclear archaeology has been published in the Journal of Science and Global Security. He received his Diplôme d’Ingénieur (M.Sc. And B.Sc.Eng.) from Ecole Centrale de Marseille in 2014. The same year he also obtained a M.Sc. in Nuclear Science and Engineering from the University of Tsinghua where he was a recipient of the Chinese Government Scholarship. Julien speaks and uses Chinese in his research and is a native French speaker.

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED
In keeping with Stanford University's guidance to event hosts

Over the last three years, the United States has done an about-face in terms of engaging North Korea on human rights. Some have argued that if we are to make progress on denuclearization with North Korea, we cannot press Pyongyang on human rights issues because we must develop a cooperative relationship. Raising human rights abuses will only make it more difficult to deal with security issues they argue. On the other hand, Ambassador King believes that human rights are not an issue that we raise after we have achieved our security goals. It is not just the right thing to do, it is an important and critical part of achieving real progress with North Korea on security issues and it is key to a better relationship between Washington and Pyongyang. Internal pressure from the North Korean elites and the public is necessary for positive change on security issues by the North, and this will only come about if there is progress on human rights.  Furthermore, North Korea, like all UN member states, has agreed to observe UN human rights obligations. If the North fails to carry out its commitments on human rights, what assurance do we have that it will fulfill security obligations it accepts?

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This public event is part of the 12th annual Koret Workshop, "The Role of Human Rights in Policy Toward North Korea," and open to the general public with registration.

The event is made possible through the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Advisory on Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)

In accordance with university guidelines, if you (or a spouse/housemate) have returned from travel to mainland China or South Korea in the last 14 days, we ask that you DO NOT come to campus until 14 days have passed since your return date and you remain symptom-free. For more information and updates, please refer to Stanford's Environmental Health & Safety website.

IMPORTANT EVENT UPDATE:

In keeping with Stanford University's March 3 message to the campus community on COVID-19 and current recommendations of the CDC, the Asia-Pacific Research Center is electing to postpone this event until further notice. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we do our best to keep our community healthy and well. 

Co-sponsored by Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and Center for South Asia (CSA).

When does mass nonviolent mobilization for political change occur, what prevents it from degenerating into violence, and when does it succeed in extracting concessions? We examine these questions in the context of India's movement for independence from Britain, and point to the key roles played by economic shocks and organization in the success of nonviolence.

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Rikhil R. Bhavnani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a faculty affiliate at the La Follette School of Public Affairs, the Elections Research Center and the Center for South Asia.

Professor Bhavnani’s research and teaching focus on inequalities in political representation, the political economy of migration, and the political economy of development. His research is particularly concerned with causal identification, and is focused on South Asia. Bhavnani is the co-author, with Bethany Lacina, of a book on the backlash against within-country migration across the developing world, published by Cambridge University Press. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and other outlets. 

Prior to starting at UW–Madison, Professor Bhavnani was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He has worked at the Center for Global Development and the International Monetary Fund, and received a PhD in political science and an MA in economics from Stanford University, and a BA in political science and economics from Yale University.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/P1-Q0OSo4yM

About this Event: The governance of big data and the prevention of their misuse is among the most topical issues in current debates among security experts. But what does it mean when security is not an issue for the stakeholders governing big biomedical data? This paper answers this question by looking at what it describes as a peculiar omission of the issue of security in the biggest harmonization cluster of biomedical research in Europe - BBMRI-ERIC. While it does treat personal data, the risks and threats are constructed through a language of anticipation and self-governance rather than security. The analysis explains why: based on document analysis, interviews, and field research, it studies (1) how are risks and threats constructed in the research with big biomedical data, (2) what regime of their governance is established in this area, and (3) what are the implications for the practices of science and the politics of security. The paper argues that this silence is a by-product of bureaucratization and responsibilization of security, which is in biobanking characteristic by discourse and practices of responsible research, ethics, and law. The paper suggests that this regime of governance precludes the prospects of addressing bigger questions that biobanks may need to deal with in the future, such as regarding the access to the biomedical data by state or private actors and their use for policing, surveillance, or other types of population governance.

Speaker's Biography: Dagmar Rychnovská is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Techno-science and societal transformation group at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. She holds a PhD in International Relations (Charles University in Prague), an MA in Comparative and International Studies (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich), and an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security (VU University Amsterdam). Her research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, security studies, and science and technology studies. Her current research explores security controversies in research and innovation governance, with a focus on bioweapons, biotechnologies, and biobanks.