COLUMN: INIT
Shifting Power Through Resistance: Social Justice in Practice
By Cella M. Sum, Alicia DeVrio, June 2024
Articles Tagged: Computing / technology policy
Articles & Features
SECTION: Features
No Tech For Apartheid and No Tech For Tyrants: A Conversation Around Organizing and Technology
Organizers at the intersection of anticolonial justice and technology, Gabriel Schubiner and Mallika G. Dharmaraj discuss their journeys, the historical context of their work, and organizing strategies.
By Gabriel Schubiner, Mallika G. Dharmaraj, June 2024
DEPARTMENT: Labz
Computing for Social Good: University of Florida
By Alaina Smith, Juan Gilbert, February 2024
SECTION: Features
Safer together
A pioneer of digital contact tracing discusses the considerations that went into building the world's first national contact tracing app and ponders the future of the technology.
By Jason Bay, April 2022
COLUMN: INIT
You mess the kitchen, you do the dishes
By Ross Teixeira, Henri Maxime Demoulin, December 2020
SECTION: Features
"We had tough times, but we've sort of sewn our way through it: the partnership quilt
Using capacitive touch sensors and traditional quilting techniques lead to the collision of seemingly disparate worlds and resulted in the creation of the Partnership Quilt, a living archive of voices in the shape of an interactive piece of craftwork.
By Angelika Strohmayer, Janis Meissner, December 2017
SECTION: Features
From social movements to social surveillance
How the technology of the Occupy movement became a mobile app for policing.
By Joan Donovan, April 2017
Filter bubbles and fake news
The results of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the U.K. and presidential election in the U.S. surprised pollsters and traditional media alike, and social media is now being blamed in part for creating echo chambers that encouraged the spread of fake news that influenced voters.
By Dominic DiFranzo, Kristine Gloria-Garcia, April 2017
Managing crises, one text at a time
Crisis Text Line CTO Jason Bennett shares his insight on the technology behind this helpline using text to reach people in need of counseling during times of crisis.
By Rahul R. Divekar, Nidhi Rastogi, April 2017
SECTION: Features
An interview with the director of biomedical informatics at Stanford
Russ Altman discusses how computational biology is rapidly transforming clinical practice, particularly in his own field of pharmacogenomics.
By Cristina Pop, Billy Rathje, July 2015
Computational and statistical issues in personalized medicine
Computational methods can be used to find associations between our genome and our traits, and new optimizations to these computations promise to do it much faster.
By Christoph Lippert, David Heckerman, July 2015
Fighting disease with data
Recent advances in genome typing and sequencing technologies have enabled quick generation of a vast amount of molecular data at very low cost. The mining and computational analysis of this type of data can help shape new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies in biomedicine.
By Marina Sirota, Bin Chen, July 2015
Advancing the frontier of data-driven healthcare
Suchi Saria of Johns Hopkins University shares how big data and machine learning can help improve the practice of healthcare, and how computing students can contribute.
By Narges Razavian, July 2015
Disease dietomics
How computational biology might help in discovering the missing links between diet and disease.
By Malay Bhattacharyya, July 2015
A conversation with Vijay Pande
The director of Stanford University's Pande Lab discusses how his work with large-scale, distributed simulation is being used to study protein folding and its connection to disease.
By Cristina Pop, July 2015
Big data comes in tiny packages
Single-cell data creates computational opportunities for discovery in disease and human health.
By Karen Sachs, Tiffany Chen, July 2015
Digital drivers in the age of massive datasets
How technology enables the data geek in life sciences and healthcare.
By Sarah Aerni, Hulya Farinas, Gautam Muralidhar, July 2015
Profile: Sriram Kosuri
Never mind the cloud, back up your selfies to DNA
Never mind the cloud, back up your selfies to DNA
By Adrian Scoică, July 2015
SECTION: Features
Opportunities of social media in health and well-being
Intelligently leveraging data from millions of social media posts is a modern public health approach that has the potential to save many lives.
By Munmun De Choudhury, December 2014
Here comes the #engagement: A serious health initiative made trendy
Creating a user experience to communicate the seriousness of HIV prevention and awareness can be both educational while entertaining. This combination along with a sense of cultural influence helps to both attract and engage millennials.
By Fay Cobb Payton, KaMar Galloway, December 2014
COLUMN: Letter from the editor
Towards a critical debate about technology and its impact
By Sean Follmer, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, June 2014
COLUMN: INIT
Women, hip-hop, and self-teaching
the new diversity in computing
By Jean Yang, June 2014
SECTION: Features
Hackers!
From the early 1980s to the present day, the tech industry, the law, and media representations have evolved in tandem, all hypnotized by the myth of "The Hacker"---an ideal coder, stereotyped as an exceptional young white man.
By Sarah Jeong, Colin McSwiggen, June 2014
Gendered expectations
A look at how implicit biases influence the advancement of women in science and engineering.
By Eve Fine, Amy Wendt, Molly Carnes, June 2014
Campus for moms
Having a baby and taking a new start. A program for women on maternity leave, teaches them how to give birth to a startup.
By Liron Lifshitz-Yadin, Daniela Raijman-Aharonov, June 2014
Networking vehicles for safety
A cyber-physical systems perspective on the design of vehicular networking solutions for safer and greener transportation.
By Yaser P. Fallah, March 2014
SECTION: Features
Something Bad Might Happen: Lawyers, anonymization and risk
The line between personal and anonymous information is often unclear. Increasingly it falls to lawyers to understand and manage the risks associated with the sharing of "anonymized" data sets.
By Marion Oswald, September 2013
Personal, Pseudonymous, and Anonymous Data: The problem of identification
Why defining what counts as personal data is important for data protection and information sharing.
By Iain Bourne, September 2013
Talking 'Bout Your Reputation
People think they want anonymity, but actually desire privacy. But how do we reframe the debate surrounding privacy and security? Perhaps technology is the answer.
By David Birch, September 2013
What is Bitcoin?
Strengths and weaknesses of the leader in a new generation of emerging cryptocurrencies.
By Dominic Hobson, September 2013
The Tor Project: An inside view
A decade since the first version was released, Tor continues to be at the center of the debate around online privacy.
By Kelley Misata, September 2013
COLUMN: Letter from the editors
Money and power in academic publishing
We continue our conversation on open access ("Information Wants to be Free" XRDS Spring 2013) by taking a closer look at a few recent developments, which highlight some of the conflicting interests fueling the debate over academic publishing.
By Inbal Talgam-Cohen, Peter Kinnaird, June 2013
SECTION: Features
A social scientist sits among ICTD workers
Reflections on the place of qualitative methods in ICTD work.
By Sumitra Nair, December 2012
Facing the African ICTD academic divide
This article stitches together the current journey of ICTD researchers based in Africa who formed a virtual network, which hopes to contribute toward the enhancement of representation within the academic ICTD community.
By Kathleen Diga, December 2012
SECTION: Features
Jumping into the water
How a Ph.D. graduate went from theoretical computer scientist to water-sensor analyzer.
By Amitai Armon, June 2012
Profile Leah Busque
Herding TaskRabbits
By Robert J. Simmons, June 2012
SECTION: Features
Inventing open government
Internet startup POPVOX connects constituents to Congress in a play to disrupt the world of advocacy.
By Joshua Tauberer, December 2011
An interview with Dr. Beth Simone Noveck
The former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful discusses open government and what it really means.
By Peter Kinnaird, December 2011
Shared values, clashing goals
The difference between aggregating public data and investigative journalism.
By Sarah Cohen, December 2011
How can software engineers help make government better?
Using their technical expertise to bring transparency to the federal government, developers are unlocking data one API at a time.
By Luigi Montanez, December 2011
Can data visualization help build democracy?
An overview of OECD's Better Life Index Experience.
By Jérôme Cukier, December 2011
DEPARTMENT: Hello world
Accessing the World Bank open data programmatically
By Anirvana Mishra, December 2011
SECTION: Features
Let's split!
Going sustainable by dividing personal transportation into two categories.
By Dan Sturges, June 2011
SECTION: Features
Massive multiplayer human computation for fun, money, and survival
Labor-on-demand---it's like cloud computing but with human workers.
By Lukas Biewald, December 2010
Ethics and tactics of professional crowdwork
Paid crowd workers are not just an API call---but all too often, they are treated like one.
By M. Six Silberman, Lilly Irani, Joel Ross, December 2010
Social learning and technical capital on the social web
The social Web is a set of ties that enable people to socialize online, a phenomenon that has existed since the early days of the Internet in environments like IRC, MUDs, and Usenet (e.g. 4, 12). People used these media in much the same way they do now: to communicate with existing friends and to meet new ones. The fundamental difference was the scale, scope, and diversity of participation.
By Sarita Yardi, December 2009
Privacy challenges and solutions in the social web
Research related to online social networks has addressed a number of important problems related to the storage, retrieval, and management of social network data. However, privacy concerns stemming from the use of social networks, or the dissemination of social network data, have largely been ignored. And with more than 250 million active Facebook (http://facebook.com) users, nearly half of whom log in at least once per day [5], these concerns can't remain unaddressed for long.
By Grigorios Loukides, Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis, December 2009
Eureka! past, present, and future of creativity research in HCI
By Umer Farooq, May 2006
Security, privacy, and anonymity
By Thomas Wright, December 2004
Signing electronic contracts
Electronic commerce faces the problem of signing electronic contracts. Three approaches for handling electronic contracts include 1) no trusted third party protocols, 2) strongly-trusted third party protocols and 3) weakly-trusted third party protocols. A secondary problem facing electronic commerce is self-enforcing contract design.
By David Molnar, September 2000
“So how are your hands?”
By Rob Jackson, November 1995
Conference report: conferences offer insifhts into how computers may affect our future
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, Adam Lake, September 1995
Social responsibility and the CS student
By Saul Jimenez, May 1995
Digital liberties
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, May 1995
Direct democracy
By Adam Lake, May 1995
Interview! Stephen R. Schach
By Saveen Reddy, Stephen R. Schach, December 1994
The Road Less Traveled: stop and smell the policy
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, September 1994
Information superwhichway?
By Craig Pfeifer, September 1994