Magazine: Winter 2020 | Volume 27, No. 2
In "Agents of Change," we feature 11 agents and collective movements working across the globe to build a habitable, equitable future empowering individual agency; the government agents who frequently stand in the way; and the technology that drives it all. Their stories demonstrate the power of research and activism in shaping our changing world, and we hope they'll convince you to connect your own work to addressing society's greatest challenges.
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SECTION: Features
Data protection in Hong Kong
How does a law turn society on its head? How does technology keep a movement alive? Through the lens of her home, Hong Kong, the author discusses legal loopholes in a new national security law that might bring about a dystopian reality, and how tomorrow's secure and private tech can fight back.
By Glacier Kwong
Max Schrems' European Court of Justice odyssey
How one privacy activist took on Facebook, the European Commission, and the United States to protect the rights of European citizens, and prevailed.
By Mihir Kshirsagar, Ross Teixeira
From individual consent to collective refusal
Big tech companies have been found to misuse personal data, often collected without consent. What can the public do to change unjust collection and use of their personal data, and what role can computer scientists play in these efforts?
By Jonathan Zong
Automating the censorship arms race
Evading oppressive internet censorship is possible, but discovering how is difficult and time-consuming for humans. Geneva is a genetic algorithm that automatically discovers and implements censorship circumvention strategies---many of which were long thought impossible.
By Kevin Bock, Dave Levin
Past, present, and past as present in India's predictive policing
In India, law enforcement's use of big data to thwart crime has instead amplified the discriminatory presence of caste, religion, gender, and other social markers within a system that is supposedly objective and neutral.
By Shivangi Narayan
'Anti-blackness is no glitch'
The conversation around and application of computer science often reinforces neoliberal ideals of what pathways students should take. Computer science education is said to be the great equalizer for marginalized youth. We grapple with how this can never be true in an educational system grounded in anti-Blackness.
By Stephanie T. Jones, Natalie Melo
How data can support equity in computing education
Data has historically been a tool of oppression. But if we consider how its interpretations and uses affect minoritized groups, data-driven tools could support diversity, equity, and inclusion in computing education and beyond.
By Benjamin Xie
iNethi: locked down but not locked out
A community-driven network seeks to overcome the digital divide in South African education by delivering e-learning to bandwidth-constrained learners.
By Andre van Zyl, David Lloyd Johnson
How machine learning can help tackle climate change
Climate change poses a major threat to society, requiring rapid action from all corners. Machine learning can be a potentially useful tool for addressing climate change, when applied in coordination with policy, engineering, and other areas of action.
By Priya Donti
Battery-free subsea internet of things
How a scalable underwater sensor network, which is entirely battery-free, has the potential to monitor the world's oceans.
By Sayed Saad Afzal
Everything you should know about online voting
Online voting has been presented as the means to ensure faster, clearer results, mainly in close races. What complexities lie behind this claim? Will we ever replace paper-voting with a technological solution?
By Matt Bernhard