Category: Articles

PhD update – September 2023

I’m back again with anoth­er Ph.D. update. Five years after I start­ed in Delft, we are near­ing the fin­ish line on this whole thing. But before we look ahead, let’s review notable events since the pre­vi­ous update in March 2023.

Occurrences

  1. I pre­sent­ed our frame­work, Con­testable AI by Design, at the annu­al NWO ICT Open con­fer­ence, which, for the first time, had an entire track ded­i­cat­ed to HCI research in the Nether­lands. It was an excel­lent oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet fel­low researchers from oth­er Dutch insti­tu­tions. The slides are avail­able as PDF at contestable.ai.
  2. I vis­it­ed Ham­burg to present our paper, Con­testable Cam­era Cars, at CHI 2023. We also received a Best Paper award, which I am, of course, very pleased with. The con­fer­ence was equal parts inspir­ing and over­whelm­ing. The best part of it was meet­ing in-per­son researchers who shared my interests.
  3. Also, at CHI, I was inter­viewed about my research by Mike Green for his pod­cast Under­stand­ing Users. You can lis­ten to it here. It is always good prac­tice to try and lay out some of my argu­ments spon­ta­neous­ly live.
  4. In June, I joined a pan­el at a BOLD Cities “talk show” to dis­cuss the design of smart city sys­tems for con­testa­bil­i­ty. It was quite an hon­or to be on the same pan­el as Eef­je Cup­pen, direc­tor of the Rathenau Insti­tute. This event was great because we had tech­no­log­i­cal, design, polit­i­cal, and pol­i­cy per­spec­tives. Sev­er­al guests argued for the need to rein­vig­o­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­ra­cy and give a more promi­nent role to elect­ed politi­cians in set­ting tech­nol­o­gy pol­i­cy. A report is avail­able here.
  5. In August, the BRIDE project had its clos­ing event. This is the NWO research project that par­tial­ly fund­ed my Ph.D. The event was an excel­lent oppor­tu­ni­ty to reflect on our work togeth­er over the past years. I took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to revis­it the work of Sask­ia Sassen on city­ness and to think through some of the impli­ca­tions of my work on con­testa­bil­i­ty for the field of smart urban­ism. The slides are avail­able at contestable.ai.
  6. Final­ly, last week, a short opin­ion piece that lays out the argu­ment for con­testable AI in what I hope is a rea­son­ably acces­si­ble man­ner, was pub­lished on the TU Delft website.
Photo of Eefje Cuppen and I being interviewed by Inge Janse at the BOLD Cities talk show on June 22, 2023—photo by Tiffany Konings.

Eef­je Cup­pen and I being inter­viewed by Inge Janse at the BOLD Cities talk show on June 22, 2023—photo by Tiffany Konings.

Envisioning Contestability Loops

Through­out this, I have been dili­gent­ly chip­ping away at my final pub­li­ca­tion, “Envi­sion­ing Con­testa­bil­i­ty Loops: Eval­u­at­ing the Ago­nis­tic Are­na as a Gen­er­a­tive Metaphor for Pub­lic AI.” I had a great time col­lab­o­rat­ing with Leon de Korte on an info­graph­ic of part of my design framework.

We took this info­graph­ic on a tour of Dutch inter­ac­tion design agen­cies and con­duct­ed con­cept design work­shops. I enjoyed return­ing to prac­tice and shar­ing the work of the past cou­ple of years with peers in prac­tice. My friends at Eend wrote a nice blog post about it.

The analy­sis of the out­comes of these work­shops forms the basis for the arti­cle, in which I explore the degree to which the guid­ing con­cept (gen­er­a­tive metaphor) behind con­testable AI, which I have dubbed the “Ago­nis­tic Are­na” is a pro­duc­tive one for design prac­ti­tion­ers. Spoil­ers: It is, but com­pet­ing metaphors are also at play in the pub­lic AI design space.

The man­u­script is close to com­ple­tion. As usu­al, putting some­thing like this togeth­er is a heavy but grat­i­fy­ing lift. I look for­ward to shar­ing the results and the under­ly­ing info­graph­ic with the broad­er world.

Are we there yet?

Look­ing ahead, I will be on a pan­el along­side the great Julian Bleeck­er and a host of oth­ers at the annu­al TU Delft Design & AI sym­po­sium in October.

But aside from that, I will keep my head down and focus on com­plet­ing my the­sis. The aim is to hand it in by the end of Novem­ber. So, two more months on the clock. Will I make it? Let’s find out!

PhD update – 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

Stills from Con­testable Cam­era Cars con­cept video.

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.

Con­testable Cam­era Cars con­cept video.

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.

It me. (Cred­it: Respon­si­ble Sens­ing Lab.)
Video of my con­tri­bu­tion. (Pakhuis de Zwi­jger / Respon­si­ble Sens­ing Lab.)

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.

Tensions in the professional field of design

I liked a pas­sage in a Kees Dorst paper on “aca­d­e­m­ic design” so much, I turned it into a lit­tle diagram.

Ten­sions in the pro­fes­sion­al field of design. (PDF)

Note that these ten­sions are inde­pen­dent of each oth­er. The dia­gram does not imply two “sides” of design. At any giv­en moment, a design activ­i­ty can be plot­ted on each axis inde­pen­dent­ly. This is also not an exhaus­tive list of ten­sions. Final­ly, Dorst claims these ten­sions are irreconcilable.

The orig­i­nal passage:

Con­tem­po­rary devel­op­ments in design can be described and under­stood in much the same way. The pro­fes­sion­al field that we so eas­i­ly label ‘design’ is com­plex, and full of inner con­tra­dic­tions. These inner ten­sions feed the dis­cus­sions in the field. To name a few: (1) the objec­tives of design and the moti­va­tion of design­ers can range from com­mer­cial suc­cess to the com­mon good. (2) The role and posi­tion of the design­er can be as an autonomous cre­ator, or as a prob­lem solver in-ser­vice to the client. (3) The dri­ve of the design­er can be ide­al­is­tic, or it can be more prag­mat­ic (4) The result­ing design can be a ‘thing’, but also imma­te­r­i­al (5) The basis for the process of design­ing can be intu­itive, or based on knowl­edge and research… Etcetera… The devel­op­ment of the design dis­ci­plines can be traced along these lines of ten­sion — with design­ers in dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments and times chang­ing posi­tion rel­a­tive to these fun­da­men­tal para­dox­es, but nev­er resolv­ing them. Ulti­mate­ly, the real strength and coher­ence of design as a field of pro­fes­sions comes from rec­og­niz­ing these con­tra­dic­tions, and the dynam­ics of the field is a result of con­tin­u­ous exper­i­men­ta­tion along the rifts defined by them. Rather than a com­mon set of prac­tices and skills that design­ers might have [Cross, 1990] it is these inner con­tra­dic­tions in design that define its cul­ture, its men­tal­i­ty. Design research should be an active force in these dis­cus­sions, build­ing bridges between them where pos­si­ble. Not to resolve them into a mono­lith­ic Sci­ence of Design, but advanc­ing the dis­cus­sion in this dynam­i­cal­ly shift­ing set of relations.

Dorst, K. (2016, June 27). Design prac­tice and design research: Final­ly togeth­er? Pro­ceed­ings of DRS 2016. Design Research Soci­ety 50th Anniver­sary Con­fer­ence, Brighton, UK. https://www.drs2016.org/212

Citizen participation in “The End of the End of History”

Below are some choice quotes on “cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion” from chap­ter 8 of The End of the End of His­to­ry, a rec­om­mend­ed book on our recent glob­al polit­i­cal his­to­ry. I feel like many of us in the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry tech­nol­o­gy design space are com­plic­it in these prac­tices to some extent. I con­tin­ue to grap­ple with alter­na­tive mod­els of mass demo­c­ra­t­ic con­trol over technology.

The Cen­ter-Left will pro­pose a range of mea­sures designed to pro­mote “civic engage­ment” or “com­mu­ni­ty participation.”

Cit­i­zens’ sum­mits, juries and pan­els all aim at par­tic­i­pa­tion rather than pow­er, at the tech­no­crat­ic incor­po­ra­tion of the peo­ple into pol­i­tics in order to man­age away conflict.

Like­wise the pop­u­lar­i­ty of delib­er­a­tive modes of engage­ment, delib­er­a­tive stake­hold­er events or work­shops are char­ac­ter­is­tic tools of tech­no­crat­ic do-good­ers as they cre­ate the sim­u­lacrum of a demo­c­ra­t­ic process in which peo­ple are assem­bled to pro­vide an osten­si­bly col­lec­tive solu­tion to a prob­lem, but deci­sions lack a bind­ing qual­i­ty or have already been tak­en in advance.

Though unable to gain trac­tion at a transna­tion­al lev­el, the Left may find some suc­cess in munic­i­pal pol­i­tics, fol­low­ing the 2010s exam­ple of Barcelona.

Side­step­ping […] ani­mus toward Big Tech com­pa­nies, [tech solu­tion­ism (Moro­zov, 2013) and the ide­ol­o­gy of ease (Green­field, 2017)] may come to be applied to non-mar­ket activ­i­ties, such as solv­ing com­mu­ni­ty prob­lems, per­haps at the lev­el of munic­i­pal government.

Sov­er­eign, nation­al pol­i­tics – which neolib­er­al­ism was designed to defang – will remain beyond the grasp of the Left. Pro­gres­sives will pre­fer instead to oper­ate at the munic­i­pal, the every­day or the supra­na­tion­al lev­el – pre­cise­ly the are­na to which neolib­er­al­ism sought to dis­place pol­i­tics, to where it could do no harm.

Hochuli, A., Hoare, G., & Cun­liffe, P. (2021). The End of the End of His­to­ry. Zero Books.

De opkomst van de meritocratie

Thi­js Klein­paste heeft een mooie boekbe­sprek­ing van Michael Young’s De opkomst van de mer­i­to­cratie in de Ned­er­landse Boekengids. Een paar pas­sages die ik vooral sterk vond hieronder.

De grote ver­di­en­ste van Young is dat hij inzichtelijk maakt hoe onschuldige principes als ‘beloning naar ver­di­en­ste’ volkomen kun­nen ontsporen als ze wor­den ingezet bin­nen een verder onveran­derd soci­aal en economisch stelsel. Con­creet: som­mi­gen een uitverko­ren posi­tie geven in een maatschap­pelijke hiërar­chie en anderen opdra­gen om hun plek te kennen. 

Het klassen­be­lang van de mer­i­to­cratie is abstracter. Het belan­grijk­ste is om allereerst een klasse of kaste te bli­jven om zo de voorde­len daar­van te kun­nen bli­jven oog­sten. In iedere mod­erne staat wordt macht uit­geoe­fend – of mer­i­to­cratis­ch­er gezegd: moet er bestu­urd wor­den – en als er dan toch een kaste moet zijn die deze taak vervult, laat dat die van de hoogst gediplomeer­den zijn. De mer­i­to­cratie repro­duceert zichzelf door deze gedachte mee te geven aan elke nieuwe licht­ing die tot haar uitverko­ren rangen toe­treedt: dat zij de juiste, met recht geroepen groep is om de wereld te orde­nen. Niet de arbei­der­sklasse, niet de ongelei­de democ­ra­tie, niet het gekri­oel van belan­gen­groep­jes – maar zij. Alle mater­iële voorde­len van de mer­i­to­cratie vloeien voort uit het in stand houden van die uitverko­ren status.

Te vaak lijkt de gedachte te zijn dat verte­gen­wo­ordig­ing en het bedi­enen van belan­gen onprob­lema­tisch in elka­ars ver­lengde liggen. Om die zelfge­noegza­amheid te door­breken is ken­nelijk iets stel­ligers nodig, zoals de gedachte dat waar man­agers en bestu­ur­ders zijn, er ges­taakt moet kun­nen wor­den: dat waar macht wordt uit­geoe­fend en waar aan­wi­jzin­gen wor­den gegeven, zij die de aan­wi­jzin­gen moeten opvol­gen kun­nen stem­men met hun voeten. Dat con­flict omar­md wordt en niet wordt gezien als iets wat gevaar­lijk is voor de maatschap­pelijke lieve vrede, de ‘economie’, of zelfs de democ­ra­tie. Con­flict is ongetwi­jfeld gevaar­lijk voor de hege­monie van de man­ag­er en diens klasse van droomkoninkjes, en daarmee voor de soev­ere­initeit van de mer­i­to­cratis­che orde, maar dat gevaar is zow­el heilza­am als noodza­ke­lijk. Een van de lessen van het boek van Young is immers ook dat je moet kiezen: zelf een rev­o­lu­tie mak­en, of wacht­en tot die uitbreekt.

Zelf lezen: https://www.nederlandseboekengids.com/20221116-thijs-kleinpaste/

PhD update – September 2022

Sev­en months since the last update. Much bet­ter than the gap of three years between the pre­vi­ous two. These past months I feel like I have begun to reap the rewards of the grunt work of the last cou­ple of years. Two papers final­ly saw the light of day, as well as a course syl­labus. Read on for some more details.

Things that hap­pened:

First, a pair of talks. In Feb­ru­ary I pre­sent­ed on “Con­testable AI & Civic Co-Design” as part of a pan­el chaired by Roy Ben­dor at Rein­vent­ing the City. A PDF of my slides is avail­able on the contestable.ai web­site, here. In March, I pre­sent­ed at the AiTech Ago­ra. The title of the talk is “Mean­ing­ful Human Con­trol Through Con­testa­bil­i­ty by Design” and the slides are avail­able here.

In Feb­ru­ary a short inter­view was pub­lished by Bold Cities, a smart city research cen­ter I am loose­ly affil­i­at­ed with.

Then, in March, came a big moment for me, with the pub­li­ca­tion of my first jour­nal arti­cle in AI & Soci­ety. Here’s the abstract, and ref­er­ence. It’s avail­able open access.

The increas­ing use of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) by pub­lic actors has led to a push for more trans­paren­cy. Pre­vi­ous research has con­cep­tu­al­ized AI trans­paren­cy as knowl­edge that empow­ers cit­i­zens and experts to make informed choic­es about the use and gov­er­nance of AI. Con­verse­ly, in this paper, we crit­i­cal­ly exam­ine if trans­paren­cy-as-knowl­edge is an appro­pri­ate con­cept for a pub­lic realm where pri­vate inter­ests inter­sect with demo­c­ra­t­ic con­cerns. We con­duct a prac­tice-based design research study in which we pro­to­type and eval­u­ate a trans­par­ent smart elec­tric vehi­cle charge point, and inves­ti­gate experts’ and cit­i­zens’ under­stand­ing of AI trans­paren­cy. We find that cit­i­zens expe­ri­ence trans­paren­cy as bur­den­some; experts hope trans­paren­cy ensures accep­tance, while cit­i­zens are most­ly indif­fer­ent to AI; and with absent means of con­trol, cit­i­zens ques­tion transparency’s rel­e­vance. The ten­sions we iden­ti­fy sug­gest trans­paren­cy can­not be reduced to a prod­uct fea­ture, but should be seen as a medi­a­tor of debate between experts and citizens.

Alfrink, Kars, Ianus Keller, Neelke Doorn, and Gerd Kortuem. “Ten­sions in Trans­par­ent Urban AI: Design­ing a Smart Elec­tric Vehi­cle Charge Point.” AI & SOCIETY, March 31, 2022. https://doi.org/10/gpszwh.

In April, the Respon­si­ble Sens­ing Lab pub­lished a report on “Respon­si­ble Drones”, to which I con­tributed a lit­tle as par­tic­i­pant on work­shops that lead up to it.

A sec­ond big mile­stone for me was mak­ing pub­lic the syl­labus for indus­tri­al design engi­neer­ing mas­ter elec­tive course “AI & Soci­ety” (no rela­tion to the jour­nal) which I have been devel­op­ing under the guid­ance of my super­vi­sor Gerd Kortuem over the past cou­ple of years. The syl­labus con­tains a read­ing list, as well as many self-guid­ed design exer­cis­es. Here’s a short description:

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (AI) is increas­ing­ly used by a vari­ety of orga­ni­za­tions in ways that impact soci­ety at scale. This 6 EC mas­ter elec­tive course aims to equip stu­dents with tools and meth­ods for the respon­si­ble design of pub­lic AI. Dur­ing sev­en weeks stu­dents attend a full-day ses­sion of lec­tures and work­shops. Stu­dents col­lab­o­rate on a group design project through­out. At the end, stu­dents indi­vid­u­al­ly deliv­er a short paper.

ID5417 Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Society

The third big mile­stone was the pub­li­ca­tion of my sec­ond jour­nal arti­cle in Minds & Machines. It is the the­o­ret­i­cal cor­ner­stone of my the­sis, a pro­vi­sion­al frame­work for design­ing con­testa­bil­i­ty into AI sys­tems. Abstract and ref­er­ence fol­low. This one is also open access.

As the use of AI sys­tems con­tin­ues to increase, so do con­cerns over their lack of fair­ness, legit­i­ma­cy and account­abil­i­ty. Such harm­ful auto­mat­ed deci­sion-mak­ing can be guard­ed against by ensur­ing AI sys­tems are con­testable by design: respon­sive to human inter­ven­tion through­out the sys­tem life­cy­cle. Con­testable AI by design is a small but grow­ing field of research. How­ev­er, most avail­able knowl­edge requires a sig­nif­i­cant amount of trans­la­tion to be applic­a­ble in prac­tice. A proven way of con­vey­ing inter­me­di­ate-lev­el, gen­er­a­tive design knowl­edge is in the form of frame­works. In this arti­cle we use qual­i­ta­tive-inter­pre­ta­tive meth­ods and visu­al map­ping tech­niques to extract from the lit­er­a­ture sociotech­ni­cal fea­tures and prac­tices that con­tribute to con­testable AI, and syn­the­size these into a design framework. 

Alfrink, Kars, Ianus Keller, Gerd Kortuem, and Neelke Doorn. “Con­testable AI by Design: Towards a Frame­work.” Minds and Machines, August 13, 2022. https://doi.org/10/gqnjcs.

Around the same time in August, Fabi­an Geis­er, whom I had been men­tor­ing for some time, grad­u­at­ed with a fas­ci­nat­ing mas­ter the­sis and project with the title “Reimag­in­ing the smart allo­ca­tion of road space in Ams­ter­dam for fair­ness”.

And final­ly, as these things were going on, I have been qui­et­ly chip­ping away at a third paper that applies the con­testable AI by design frame­work to the phe­nom­e­non of cam­era cars used by munic­i­pal­i­ties. My aim was to cre­ate an exam­ple of what I mean by con­testable AI, and use the exam­ple to inter­view civ­il ser­vants about their views on the chal­lenges fac­ing imple­men­ta­tion of con­testa­bil­i­ty in the pub­lic AI sys­tems they are involved with. I’ve sub­mit­ted the man­u­script, titled “Con­testable Cam­era Cars: A spec­u­la­tive design explo­ration of pub­lic AI that is open and respon­sive to dis­pute”, to CHI, and will hear back ear­ly Novem­ber. Fin­gers crossed for that one.

Look­ing ahead:

So what’s next? Well, I have lit­tle under a year left on my PhD con­tract, so I should real­ly begin wrap­ping up. I am con­sid­er­ing a final pub­li­ca­tion, but have not set­tled on any top­ic in par­tic­u­lar yet. Cur­rent inter­ests include AI sys­tem mon­i­tor­ing, visu­al meth­ods, and more besides. Once that final paper is in the can I will turn my atten­tion to putting togeth­er the the­sis itself, which is paper-based, so most­ly requires writ­ing an over­all intro­duc­tion and con­clu­sion to book­end the includ­ed pub­li­ca­tions. Should be a piece of cake, right?

And after the PhD? I am not sure yet, but I hope to remain involved in research and teach­ing, while at the same time per­haps get­ting a bit more back into design prac­tice besides. If at all pos­si­ble, hope­ful­ly in the domain of pub­lic sec­tor appli­ca­tions of AI.

That’s it for this update. I will be back at some point when there is more news to share.

PhD update – January 2022

It has been three years since I last wrote an update on my PhD. I guess anoth­er post is in order. 

My PhD plan was for­mal­ly green-lit in Octo­ber 2019. I am now over three years into this thing. There are rough­ly two more years left on the clock. I update my plans on a rolling basis. By my lat­est esti­ma­tion, I should be ready to request a date for my defense in May 2023. 

Of course, the pan­dem­ic forced me to adjust course. I am lucky enough not to be locked into par­tic­u­lar meth­ods or cas­es that are fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pat­i­ble with our cur­rent predica­ment. But still, I had to change up my meth­ods, and recon­sid­er the sequenc­ing of my planned studies. 

The con­fer­ence paper I men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous update, using the MX3D bridge to explore smart cities’ log­ic of con­trol and city­ness, was reject­ed by DIS. I per­formed a rewrite, but then came to the con­clu­sion it was kind of a false start. These kinds of things are all in the game, of course.

The sec­ond paper I wrote uses the Trans­par­ent Charg­ing Sta­tion to inves­ti­gate how notions of trans­par­ent AI dif­fer between experts and cit­i­zens. It was final­ly accept­ed late last year and should see pub­li­ca­tion in AI & Soci­ety soon. It is titled Ten­sions in Trans­par­ent Urban AI: Design­ing A Smart Elec­tric Vehi­cle Charge Point. This piece went through mul­ti­ple major revi­sions and was pre­vi­ous­ly reject­ed by DIS and CHI.

A third paper, Con­testable AI by Design: Towards A Frame­work, uses a sys­tem­at­ic lit­er­a­ture review of AI con­testa­bil­i­ty to con­struct a pre­lim­i­nary design frame­work, is cur­rent­ly under review at a major phi­los­o­phy of tech­nol­o­gy jour­nal. Fin­gers crossed.

And cur­rent­ly, I am work­ing on my fourth pub­li­ca­tion, tan­gen­tial­ly titled Con­testable Cam­era Cars: A Spec­u­la­tive Design Explo­ration of Pub­lic AI Sys­tems Respon­sive to Val­ue Change, which will be based on empir­i­cal work that uses spec­u­la­tive design as a way to devel­op guide­lines and exam­ples for the afore­men­tioned design frame­work, and to inves­ti­gate civ­il ser­vants’ views on the path­ways towards con­testable AI sys­tems in pub­lic administration.

Once that one is done, I intend to do one more study, prob­a­bly look­ing into mon­i­tor­ing and trace­abil­i­ty as poten­tial lever­age points for con­testa­bil­i­ty, after which I will turn my atten­tion to com­plet­ing my thesis. 

Aside from my research, in 2021 was allowed to devel­op and teach a mas­ter elec­tive cen­tered around my PhD top­ic, titled AI & Soci­ety. In it, stu­dents are equipped with tech­ni­cal knowl­edge of AI, and tools for think­ing about AI ethics. They apply these to a design stu­dio project focused on con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing a respon­si­ble AI-enabled ser­vice that address­es a social issue the city of Ams­ter­dam might con­ceiv­ably strug­gle with. Stu­dents also write a brief paper reflect­ing on and cri­tiquing their group design work. You can see me on Vimeo do a brief video intro­duc­tion for stu­dents who are con­sid­er­ing the course. I will be run­ning the course again this year start­ing end of February.

I also men­tored a num­ber of bril­liant mas­ter grad­u­a­tion stu­dents: Xueyao Wang (with Jacky Bour­geois as chair) Jooy­oung Park, Loes Sloet­jes (both with Roy Ben­dor as chair) and cur­rent­ly Fabi­an Geis­er (with Euiy­oung Kim as chair). Work­ing with stu­dents is one of the best parts of being in academia.

All of the above would not have been pos­si­ble with­out the great sup­port from my super­vi­so­ry team: Ianus Keller, Neelke Doorn and Gerd Kortuem. I should also give spe­cial men­tion to Thi­js Turel at AMS Institute’s Respon­si­ble Sens­ing Lab, where most of my empir­i­cal work is situated.

If you want to dig a lit­tle deep­er into some of this, I recent­ly set up a web­site for my PhD project over at contestable.ai.

Research Through Design Reading List

After post­ing the list of engi­neer­ing ethics read­ings it occurred to me I also have a real­ly nice col­lec­tion of things to read from a course on research through design taught by Pieter Jan Stap­pers, which I took ear­li­er this year. I fig­ured some might get some use out of it and I like hav­ing it for my own ref­er­ence here as well. 

The back­bone for this course is the chap­ter on research through design by Stap­pers and Giac­car­di in the ency­clo­pe­dia of human-com­put­er inter­ac­tion, which I high­ly recommend. 

All of the read­ings below are ref­er­enced in that chap­ter. I’ve read some, quick­ly gut­ted oth­ers for mean­ing and the remain­der is still on my to-read list. For me per­son­al­ly, the things on anno­tat­ed port­fo­lios and inter­me­di­ate-lev­el knowl­edge by Gaver and Löw­gren were the most imme­di­ate­ly use­ful and applic­a­ble. I’d read the Zim­mer­man paper ear­li­er and although it’s pret­ty con­crete in its pre­scrip­tions I did not real­ly latch on to it.

  1. Brandt, Eva, and Thomas Binder. “Exper­i­men­tal design research: geneal­o­gy, inter­ven­tion, argu­ment.” Inter­na­tion­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Soci­eties of Design Research, Hong Kong 10 (2007).
  2. Gaver, Bill, and John Bow­ers. “Anno­tat­ed port­fo­lios.” inter­ac­tions 19.4 (2012): 40–49.
  3. Gaver, William. “What should we expect from research through design?.” Pro­ceed­ings of the SIGCHI con­fer­ence on human fac­tors in com­put­ing sys­tems. ACM, 2012.
  4. Löw­gren, Jonas. “Anno­tat­ed port­fo­lios and oth­er forms of inter­me­di­ate-lev­el knowl­edge.” Inter­ac­tions 20.1 (2013): 30–34.
  5. Stap­pers, Pieter Jan, F. Sleeswijk Viss­er, and A. I. Keller. “The role of pro­to­types and frame­works for struc­tur­ing explo­rations by research through design.” The Rout­ledge Com­pan­ion to Design Research (2014): 163–174.
  6. Stap­pers, Pieter Jan. “Meta-lev­els in Design Research.”
  7. Stap­pers, Pieter Jan. “Pro­to­types as cen­tral vein for knowl­edge devel­op­ment.” Pro­to­type: Design and craft in the 21st cen­tu­ry (2013): 85–97.
  8. Wensveen, Stephan, and Ben Matthews. “Pro­to­types and pro­to­typ­ing in design research.” The Rout­ledge Com­pan­ion to Design Research. Tay­lor & Fran­cis (2015).
  9. Zim­mer­man, John, Jodi For­l­izzi, and Shel­ley Even­son. “Research through design as a method for inter­ac­tion design research in HCI.” Pro­ceed­ings of the SIGCHI con­fer­ence on Human fac­tors in com­put­ing sys­tems. ACM, 2007.

Bonus lev­el: sev­er­al items relat­ed to “mud­dling through”…

  1. Flach, John M., and Fred Voorhorst. “What mat­ters?: Putting com­mon sense to work.” (2016).
  2. Lind­blom, Charles E. “Still Mud­dling, Not Yet Through.” Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tion Review 39.6 (1979): 517–26.
  3. Lind­blom, Charles E. “The sci­ence of mud­dling through.” Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tion Review 19.2 (1959): 79–88.

Engineering Ethics Reading List

I recent­ly fol­lowed an excel­lent three-day course on engi­neer­ing ethics. It was offered by the TU Delft grad­u­ate school and taught by Behnam Taibi with guest lec­tures from sev­er­al of our faculty.

I found it par­tic­u­lar­ly help­ful to get some sug­ges­tions for fur­ther read­ing that rep­re­sent some of the foun­da­tion­al ideas in the field. I fig­ured it would be use­ful to oth­ers as well to have a point­er to them. 

So here they are. I’ve quick­ly gut­ted these for their mean­ing. The one by Van de Poel I did read entire­ly and can high­ly rec­om­mend for any­one who’s doing design of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and wants to escape from the informed con­sent conundrum. 

I intend to dig into the Doorn one, not just because she’s one of my pro­mot­ers but also because resilience is a con­cept that is close­ly relat­ed to my own inter­ests. I’ll also get into the Flori­di one in detail but the con­cept of infor­ma­tion qual­i­ty and the care ethics per­spec­tive on the prob­lem of infor­ma­tion abun­dance and atten­tion scarci­ty I found imme­di­ate­ly applic­a­ble in inter­ac­tion design.

  1. Stil­goe, Jack, Richard Owen, and Phil Mac­naght­en. “Devel­op­ing a frame­work for respon­si­ble inno­va­tion.” Research Pol­i­cy 42.9 (2013): 1568–1580.
  2. Van den Hov­en, Jeroen. “Val­ue sen­si­tive design and respon­si­ble inno­va­tion.” Respon­si­ble inno­va­tion (2013): 75–83.
  3. Hans­son, Sven Ove. “Eth­i­cal cri­te­ria of risk accep­tance.” Erken­nt­nis 59.3 (2003): 291–309.
  4. Van de Poel, Ibo. “An eth­i­cal frame­work for eval­u­at­ing exper­i­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy.” Sci­ence and engi­neer­ing ethics22.3 (2016): 667–686.
  5. Hans­son, Sven Ove. “Philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems in cost–benefit analy­sis.” Eco­nom­ics & Phi­los­o­phy 23.2 (2007): 163–183.
  6. Flori­di, Luciano. “Big Data and infor­ma­tion qual­i­ty.” The phi­los­o­phy of infor­ma­tion qual­i­ty. Springer, Cham, 2014. 303–315.
  7. Doorn, Neelke, Pao­lo Gar­doni, and Colleen Mur­phy. “A mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary def­i­n­i­tion and eval­u­a­tion of resilience: The role of social jus­tice in defin­ing resilience.” Sus­tain­able and Resilient Infra­struc­ture (2018): 1–12.

We also got a draft of the intro chap­ter to a book on engi­neer­ing and ethics that Behnam is writ­ing. That looks very promis­ing as well but I can’t share yet for obvi­ous reasons.

PhD update – January 2019

Thought I’d post a quick update on my PhD. Since my pre­vi­ous post almost five months have passed. I’ve been devel­op­ing my plan fur­ther, for which you’ll find an updat­ed descrip­tion below. I’ve also put togeth­er my very first con­fer­ence paper, co-authored with my super­vi­sor Gerd Kortuem. It’s a case study of the MX3D smart bridge for Design­ing Inter­ac­tive Sys­tems 2019. We’ll see if it gets accept­ed. But in any case, writ­ing some­thing has been huge­ly edu­ca­tion­al. And once I final­ly fig­ured out what the hell I was doing, it was sort of fun as well. Still kind of a trip to be paid to do this kind of work. Look­ing ahead, I am set­ting goals for this year and the near­er term as well. It’s all very rough still but it will like­ly involve research through design as a method and maybe object ori­ent­ed ontol­ogy as a the­o­ry. All of which will serve to oper­a­tionalise and eval­u­ate the use­ful­ness of the “con­testa­bil­i­ty” con­cept in the con­text of smart city infra­struc­ture. To be continued—and I wel­come all your thoughts!

Design­ing Smart City Infra­struc­ture for Contestability

The use of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy in cities increas­ing­ly sub­jects cit­i­zens to auto­mat­ed data col­lec­tion, algo­rith­mic deci­sion mak­ing and remote con­trol of phys­i­cal space. Cit­i­zens tend to find these sys­tems and their out­comes hard to under­stand and pre­dict [1]. More­over, the opac­i­ty of smart urban sys­tems pre­cludes full cit­i­zen­ship and obstructs people’s ‘right to the city’ [2].

A com­mon­ly pro­posed solu­tion is to improve cit­i­zens under­stand­ing of sys­tems by mak­ing them more open and trans­par­ent [3]. For exam­ple, GDPR pre­scribes people’s right to expla­na­tion of auto­mat­ed deci­sions they have been sub­ject­ed to. For anoth­er exam­ple, the city of Ams­ter­dam offers a pub­licly acces­si­ble reg­is­ter of urban sen­sors, and is com­mit­ted to open­ing up all the data they collect.

How­ev­er, it is not clear that open­ness and trans­paren­cy in and of itself will yield the desired improve­ments in under­stand­ing and gov­ern­ing of smart city infra­struc­tures [4]. We would like to sug­gest that for a sys­tem to per­ceived as account­able, peo­ple must be able to con­test its workings—from the data it col­lects, to the deci­sions it makes, all the way through to how those deci­sions are act­ed on in the world.

The lead­ing research ques­tion for this PhD there­fore is how to design smart city infrastructure—urban sys­tems aug­ment­ed with inter­net-con­nect­ed sens­ing, pro­cess­ing and actu­at­ing capabilities—for con­testa­bil­i­ty [5]: the extent to which a sys­tem sup­ports the abil­i­ty of those sub­ject­ed to it to oppose its work­ings as wrong or mistaken.

Ref­er­ences

  1. Bur­rell, Jen­na. “How the machine ‘thinks’: Under­stand­ing opac­i­ty in machine learn­ing algo­rithms.” Big Data & Soci­ety 3.1 (2016): 2053951715622512.
  2. Kitchin, Rob, Pao­lo Car­dul­lo, and Cesare Di Feli­cianto­nio. “Cit­i­zen­ship, Jus­tice and the Right to the Smart City.” (2018).
  3. Abdul, Ashraf, et al. “Trends and tra­jec­to­ries for explain­able, account­able and intel­li­gi­ble sys­tems: An hci research agen­da.” Pro­ceed­ings of the 2018 CHI Con­fer­ence on Human Fac­tors in Com­put­ing Sys­tems. ACM, 2018.
  4. Anan­ny, Mike, and Kate Craw­ford. “See­ing with­out know­ing: Lim­i­ta­tions of the trans­paren­cy ide­al and its appli­ca­tion to algo­rith­mic account­abil­i­ty.” New Media & Soci­ety 20.3 (2018): 973–989.
  5. Hirsch, Tad, et al. “Design­ing con­testa­bil­i­ty: Inter­ac­tion design, machine learn­ing, and men­tal health.” Pro­ceed­ings of the 2017 Con­fer­ence on Design­ing Inter­ac­tive Sys­tems. ACM, 2017.