Event: Improving our Digital Environments with Citizen Science, Oct. 17
The Data + Feminism Lab at MIT is pleased to host a talk by Dr. J. Nathan Matias: Improving our Digital Environments with Citizen ScienceCity Arena (DUSP 9-255)4pm-5:30pm, October 17th.
As the public ask questions about the power of technology in society and wonder how to create change, many people mistrust the technology industry to develop answers. How can we advance a world where digital power is guided by evidence and accountable to the public? Industry-independent participatory science, otherwise known as citizen science, currently plays a central role in the governance of complex systems with powerful corporate actors, including the environment, product safety, and consumer protection. In this talk, J. Nathan Matias will describe how participatory scientists collect data and test interventions for change in our digital lives–on topics including harassment, pro-social behavior, misinformation, and algorithmic accountability. Designing this work requires us to re-visit our assumptions about knowledge and power in computing, and it can lead to fundamental scientific discoveries about ourselves and our worlds.
Dr. J. Nathan Matias (@natematias@social.coop) is an assistant professor and founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University, which organizes industry-independent participatory science to understand and improve our digital environments. His research and commentary has been published in Nature, PNAS, Nature Human Behavior, ACM CHI, and the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. A graduate of the MIT Center for Civic Media, he has held positions at MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia University, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. Matias has won multiple awards for his science, design, and policy work from the Association of Computer Machinery, Fast Co Company, and the Mozilla Foundation. He is a co-founder of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, and his journalism has been published by the Guardian, FiveThirtyEight, The Atlantic, and Adventure Cyclist.