Month: March 2023

Hel­lo again, and wel­come to anoth­er update on my Ph.D. research progress. I will briefly run down the things that hap­pened since the last update, what I am cur­rent­ly work­ing on, and some notable events on the horizon.

Recent happenings

CHI 2023 paper

First off, the big news is that the paper I sub­mit­ted to CHI 2023 was accept­ed. This is a big deal for me because HCI is the core field I aim to con­tribute to, and CHI is its flag­ship conference.

Here’s the full citation:

Alfrink, K., Keller, I., Doorn, N., & Kortuem, G. (2023). Con­testable Cam­era Cars: A Spec­u­la­tive Design Explo­ration of Pub­lic AI That Is Open and Respon­sive to Dis­pute. https://doi.org/10/jwrx

I have had sev­er­al papers reject­ed in the past (CHI is noto­ri­ous­ly hard to get accept­ed at), so I feel vin­di­cat­ed. The paper is already avail­able as an arX­iv preprint, as is the con­cept video that forms the core of the study I report on (many thanks to my pal Simon for col­lab­o­rat­ing on this with me). CHI 2023 hap­pens in late April. I will be rid­ing a train over there to present the paper in per­son. Very much look­ing for­ward to that.

Responsible Sensing Lab anniversary event

I briefly pre­sent­ed my research at the Respon­si­ble Sens­ing Lab anniver­sary event on Feb­ru­ary 16. The whole event was quite enjoy­able, and I got some encour­ag­ing respons­es to my ideas after­ward which is always nice. The event was record­ed in full. My appear­ance starts around the 1:47:00 mark.

Tweeting, tooting, blogging

I have been get­ting back into the habit of tweet­ing, toot­ing, and even the occa­sion­al spot of blog­ging on this web­site again. As the end of my Ph.D. nears, I fig­ured it might be worth it to engage more active­ly with “the dis­course,” as they say. I most­ly share stuff I read that is relat­ed to my research and that I find inter­est­ing. Although, of course, posts relat­ed to my twin sons’ music taste and strug­gles with uni­ver­si­ty bureau­cra­cy always win out in the end. (Yes, I am aware my tim­ing is ter­ri­ble, see­ing as how we have basi­cal­ly final­ly con­clud­ed social media was a bad idea after all.)

Current activities

Envisioning Contestability Loops

At the moment, the major­i­ty of my time is tak­en up by con­duct­ing a final study (work­ing title: “Envi­sion­ing Con­testa­bil­i­ty Loops”). I am excit­ed about this one because I get to once again col­lab­o­rate with a pro­fes­sion­al design­er on an arti­fact, in this case, a visu­al expla­na­tion of my frame­work, and use the result as a research instru­ment to dig into, in this case, the strengths and weak­ness­es of con­testa­bil­i­ty as a gen­er­a­tive metaphor for the design of pub­lic AI.

Thesis

In par­al­lel, I have begun to put togeth­er my the­sis. It is paper-based, but of course, the intro­duc­to­ry and con­clud­ing chap­ters require some thought still.

The aim is to have both the final arti­cle and the­sis fin­ished by the end of sum­mer and then begin the ardu­ous process of get­ting a date for my defense, assem­bling a com­mit­tee, etc.

Agonistic Machine Vision Development

In the mean­time, I am also men­tor­ing Lau­ra, anoth­er bril­liant mas­ter grad­u­a­tion stu­dent. Her project, titled “Ago­nis­tic Machine Vision Devel­op­ment,” builds on my pre­vi­ous research. In par­tic­u­lar, one of the chal­lenges I iden­ti­fied in Con­testable Cam­era Cars, that of the dif­fer­en­tial in infor­ma­tion posi­tion between cit­i­zens and experts when they col­lab­o­rate in par­tic­i­pa­to­ry machine learn­ing ses­sions. It’s very grat­i­fy­ing to see oth­ers do design work that push­es these ideas further.

Upcoming events

So yeah, like I already men­tioned, I will be speak­ing at CHI 2023, which takes place on 23–28 April in Ham­burg. The sched­ule says I am pre­sent­ing on April 25 as part of the ses­sion on “AI Trust, Trans­paren­cy and Fair­ness”, which includes some excel­lent-look­ing contributions.

And before that, I will be at ICT.OPEN in Utrecht on April 20 to present briefly on the Con­testable AI by Design frame­work as part of the CHI NL track. It should be fun.

…

That’s it for this update. Maybe, by the time the next one rolls around, I will be able to share a date for my defense. But let’s not jinx it.