UC Berkeley School of Information

From the UC Berkeley School of Information 2014 Commencement (May 17, 2014). Keynote Speaker Nicole Wong is the deputy US chief technology officer, advising on Internet policy and privacy. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Nicole was the legal director at Twitter and vice president and deputy general counsel at Google, primarily responsible for the company’s product and regulatory matters. She is also a former partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie. Nicole is a frequent speaker and author on issues related to law and technology, including multiple appearances before the US Congress regarding Internet policy, censorship and privacy. She has taught media and Internet law and policy courses at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the advisory board to the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and has served on the governing committee of the ABA Communication Law Forum and the board of directors of the First Amendment Coalition. Nicole received

Experience designers and researchers are working on their most ambitious challenge yet that represents a new frontier in user interfaces: creating a constellation of systems, machines, and people — including wearable gadgets, tablets, smart phones, and appliances — that can communicate with one another in an autonomous fashion. We are constantly adding new functions to gadgets and new devices to the ecosystem without much thought as to their totality or cumulative complexity. In the coming era of ubiquitous sensors and miniaturized mobile computing, designers need to think about how to weave the digital world into our lives at work so seamlessly that we don’t even notice. Already we’re seeing a groundswell of new technologies that insinuate themselves seamlessly into users’ personal lives like the voice and gesture-controlled Xbox, but this is just the beginning. At GE, we want to apply the same embedded intelligence to the world of big iron and people at work to create disruptive experiences, not just produc

What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens’ lives? Youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens’ use of social media. In her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, boyd explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, she argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers’ ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Bio: Dr. danah boyd is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, a research assistant professor at New York University, a fellow of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an alumna of the UC Berkeley School of Information (Ph.D. ’08). Dr. boyd is “the reigning expert on how young people use the Internet,” according to Fortune Magazine, which named her the smart

This workshop was the last in a series of three events co-hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and academic institutions across the country in response to President Obama’s call for a review of privacy issues in the context of increased digital information and the computing power to process it. --- Hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. --- The closing keynote was delivered by John Podesta. John Podesta is currently counselor to the president. In 2008, he served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition team. Previously, Podesta served as White House chief of staff to President William J. Clinton. --- Video of all of the day's sessions are available at http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/2014bigdataworkshop

The dissemination of reproducible computational research — where the code and data that generated the results are made conveniently available — is now widely recognized as a transformative movement within the scientific community. It is attracting attention not only from researchers but also from librarians and repository managers, journal editorial boards, funding agencies and policy makers, and scientific software developers. This talk motivates the rationale for this shift, and presents solutions I have been developing to facilitate reliable and re-usable computational research including: new empirical findings on changes to journal data and code publication policies; best practices for code and data release; the open source dissemination and access tool ResearchCompendia.org; and the "Reproducible Research Standard" for ensuring the distribution of legally usable data and code. Some of these results are described in the forthcoming co-edited books Implementing Reproducible Research and Privacy, Big Data,

Ongoing national and global cyberinfrastructure initiatives pose significant information organization challenges. Research targeting metadata helps address these challenges. This presentation covers a set of studies investigating technical, conceptual, and semantic-driven metadata solutions for organizing the deluge of digital data. The presentation introduces the Dryad data repository and the HIVE ontology environment; outlines motivating research questions and methods; and highlights key findings to date, noting the wider implications of this work. Further, I will describe new research emphases, including work as a Data Science Fellow at the National Consortium for Data Science, in affiliation with the Renaissance Computing Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I conclude by discussing how research focusing on metadata is an integral component of information organization and integrates with the I School environment.

For most of history, health care was centered around the doctor’s office or hospital. It was the era of the lone practitioner, the omniscient physician to whom patients turned to treat their ailments. That was the industrial age of medicine. Today, health care is much more complex. The proliferation of information available to physicians and to their patients has fundamentally shifted the locus of information and power to patients. In the information age of medicine, we must optimize the use of information, technology, tools, and teams. We need to turn masses of patient data, science, and clinical evidence into clinical knowledge. This information must be available to patients, physicians, and care teams. And they must have access to technology and tools to make the right thing easier to do. Health care must transform in order to meet the challenges of the information age and to address the crisis of affordability and value in health care. We must become a learning industry. We need to draw from all parts o

Many companies and observers are excited about the possibility of competitive advantage from analytics on "big data," but many don’t understand the differences between big and small data analytics. There are also substantial differences in how large, established organizations and startups approach big data. In this presentation, Tom Davenport will describe what organizations are attempting to accomplish with big data. Several leading examples of companies—large firms and startup—that are aggressively pursuing big data will be presented. Davenport will then describe how big data differs from previous approaches to analytics and data management on small data. Finally, he'll address some of the key factors that big and small data analytics have in common, and will describe his ideas on their integration using the “Analytics 3.0” framework he has developed.

Catalyst is a £1.9M UK funded research project looking at how digital technologies either promote or act as a barrier to social change. Catalyst has developed a novel approach to such research which involves building partnerships of academics and non-academics (community organizations, charities, social enterprises etc.) to jointly imagine and develop digital technologies to address particular social agendas. Catalyst is run as a framework of projects — or sprints — in which teams form and very quickly work together on new ideas with long term sustainability in mind from the start. To date, Catalyst has involved around 70 community groups as well as academics from seven different disciplines (computing, psychology, sociology, management, health and medicine, art and design, linguistics). Projects to date have worked with charities for the homeless, adults on the autism spectrum, local sustainability initiatives, and the use of social media to connect communities. In this talk, Jon Whittle gives an overview o

How should we strike the right balance between national security and privacy and civil liberties in federal counterterrorism programs? Join members of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to discuss the importance of government transparency regarding counterterrorism efforts, international issues raised by US surveillance programs, the impact of NSA programs on US industry and the Internet, and the Board’s role going forward. The U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is a bipartisan independent federal agency. Chairman David Medine and board members Rachel Brand, Elisebeth Collins Cook, and James Dempsey will discuss the Board's recent report and recommendations on the NSA telephony metadata program and reform of the operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

David Reiley presents the results of a randomized experiment with 1.6 million customers measuring positive causal effects of online advertising for a major retailer. The advertising profitably increases purchases by 5%. 93% of the increase occurs in brick-and-mortar stores; 78% of the increase derives from consumers who never click the ads. This large sample reaches the statistical frontier for measuring economically relevant effects. Econometric efficiency was improved by supplementing experimental variation with non-experimental variation caused by consumer browsing behavior. This experiment provides a specification check for observational difference-in-differences and cross-sectional estimators; the latter exhibits a large negative bias three times the estimated experimental effect.

A timely and engaging conversation with Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties director at the ACLU of Northern California. We will be exploring the latest updates related to NSA spying — what we now know, what we still don’t know, and opportunities in Congress, the courts, companies, and in communities to rein in warrantless surveillance and better safeguard privacy and free speech.

Big data brings us challenges, but also hopes. This talk discusses these challenges and hopes from the semantic perspective. I will present two use cases to demonstrate the potential of semantic technologies for data integration and data analysis. The first use case discusses how to integrate researcher profiling data from different universities using their faculty annual report data. The second use case focuses on how to integrate public knowledge embedded in experimental data and literature data to facilitate drug discovery. It highlights some foreseeable future changes for search and some issues that urgently need to be solved.

How is the Internet experienced in the margins of the global economy? In her new book, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana, I School professor Jenna Burrell presents a user study set initially in the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana but gradually expanded to include roadside youth clubs, churches, secondhand computer shops, and electronic waste dumps. This talk offers two threads of analysis from the book. First, an examination of the youth who used the Internet in these spaces to cultivate foreign contacts through Yahoo! chatrooms and dating sites and how they made sense of the frequent and often sudden breakdowns in their online relationships. Second, an argument for the supply of secondhand computers imported from abroad by Ghanaian transnational family businesses as a process innovation that made the Internet cafés materially feasible despite Ghana’s economic and infrastructural limitations. The book bridges between science and technology studies and African studies to demonstrate

What role will museums and libraries play in the information technology landscape of the future? Todd Carter presents his vision of museums and libraries empowered by Web 2.0 and crowd-sourcing technologies. He will focus on improving media annotation with open-sourced anthologies, linked open data, tagging with linked data URIs, semantics, machines, and crowd-sourced human computation. Todd Carter is the CEO and co-founder of Tagasauris, Inc., a metadata curation platform that incorporates crowd-sourcing, machine learning, linked open data, and the semantic web. Todd is widely respected as a leader in the digital asset, photography, and linked open data community, with over 20 years experience working with photo archives, libraries, museums, and information technology systems. Tagasauris has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Business Week, The Economist and others. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Tagasauris and The Museum of the City of New York a grant to annotate the museum's

Join us for a discussion with author Howard Rheingold. In his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold asks, how can we use digital media so that they help us become empowered participants rather than passive consumers; grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking neurotics? In Net Smart, he demonstrates how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully. Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other onli

Everything we do online leaves traces: our tweets, Facebook likes, and YouTube views. Currently, Big Data is all about sifting through cloud stores of these traces with little question as to why those traces exist. Big Data analyses are based on data that are already collected; they are not about asking what should be collected to answer important social and motivational questions. I ask: What motivates people to do what they do? And how can we build predictive models of what people do based on their contextualized and emerging interests, and not just their numerical data. Finding the reasons why people do what they do, and why they create the data trails in the first place, invites a new set of questions and demands a new set of methods. I present investigations into uncovering and understanding these motivations through three areas of inquiry: genre classification, topic prediction, and event detection. I propose changes for how we measure engagement, how we design system instrumentation, and how we design

There is a great realignment happening that is changing the way the world sees itself. This realignment is the product of economic globalization, amazing advances in technology and the end of a monistic media age. The world has, for a generation, been dominated by massive Western media companies who control the most influential media: television. In the coming years, television will realign alongside social media to a pluralistic world media culture within which many new narratives will vie for our attention. Whenever media evolves so does society. There are major challenges ahead for the simplistic binary narratives spun by television, good vs. evil, black vs. white, red vs. blue, right vs. wrong. Humanity is more complex that that, and we will be confronting that complexity head-on from now on.

A global struggle for control of the Internet is now underway. At stake are no less than civil liberties, privacy, and even the character of democracy in the 21st century. Many commentators have debated whether the Internet is ultimately a force for freedom of expression and political liberation, or for alienation, and repression. Rebecca MacKinnon, author of the new book Consent of the Networked, moves the debate about the Internet’s political impact to a new level. It is time, she says, to stop arguing over whether the Internet empowers individuals and societies, and address the more fundamental and urgent question of how technology should be structured and governed to support the rights and liberties of all the world’s Internet users. Drawing upon two decades of experience as an international journalist, co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, Chinese Internet censorship expert, and Internet freedom activist, MacKinnon offers a framework for concerned citizens to understand the complex and

Scientific computation is emerging as absolutely central to the scientific method, but the prevalence of very relaxed practices is leading to a credibility crisis affecting many scientific fields. It is impossible to verify most of the results that computational scientists present at conferences and in papers today. Reproducible computational research, in which all details of computations — code and data — are made conveniently available to others, is necessary for a resolution of this crisis. This requires a multifaceted approach including policy solutions, computational tools for data and code dissemination, curation and archiving, and open licensing frameworks such as the Reproducible Research Standard.