PhD update – June 2024

I am writing this final PhD update as a freshly minted doctor. On Thursday, May 23, 2024, I successfully defended my thesis, ‘Contestable Artificial Intelligence: Constructive Design Research for Public Artificial Intelligence Systems that are Open and Responsive to Dispute.’

I started the PhD on September 1, 2018 (read the very first update posted on that day here). So, that’s five years, eight months, 23 days from start to finish. It has been quite the journey, and I feel happy and relieved to have completed it. I am proud of the work embodied in the thesis. Most of all, I am thankful for the transformative learning experience, none of which would have been possible without the support of my supervisors Gerd, Ianus, and Neelke.

On the day itself, I was honored to have as my external committee members professors Dignum, Löwgren, van Zoonen, and van de Poel, professor Voûte as the chair, and Joost and Mireia as my paranymphs.

The thesis PDF can be downloaded at the TU Delft repository, and a video of the proceedings is available on YouTube.

Me, with a copy of the thesis, shortly before starting the layperson’s talk. Photo: Roy Borghouts.

Recent events

Reviewing my notes since the last update, below are some more notable things that happened in the past eight months.

  • I ran a short workshop on AI Pedagogy Through A Design Lens, together with Hosana Morales, at the TU Delft spring symposium on AI education. Read the post.
  • A story about my research was published on the TU Delft industrial design engineering website in the run-up to my defense on May 14, 2024. Read the story.
  • I updated and ran the fifth and final iteration of the AI & Society industrial design engineering master elective course from February 28 through April 10, 2024. A previous version is documented here, which I plan to update sometime in the near future.
  • I gave a talk titled Contestable AI: Designing for Human Autonomy at the Amsterdam UX meetup on February 21, 2024. Download the slides.
  • The outcomes of a design sprint on tools for third-party scrutiny, organized by the Responsible Sensing Lab, which took inspiration from my research, were published on December 7, 2023. Read the report.
  • I was interviewed by Mireia Yurrita Semperena for a DCODE podcast episode titled Beyond Values in Algorithmic Design, published November 6, 2023. Listen to the episode.
  • Together with Claudio Sarra and Marco Almada, I hosted an online seminar titled Building Contestable Systems on October 26, 2023. Read the thread.
  • I was a panelist at the Design & AI Symposium 2023 on October 18, 2023.
  • A paper I co-authored titled When ‘Doing Ethics’ Meets Public Procurement of Smart City Technology – an Amsterdam Case Study, was presented by first author Mike de Kreek at IASDR 2023 on October 9-13. Read the paper.

Looking ahead

I will continue at TU Delft as a postdoctoral researcher and will stay focused on design, AI, and politics, but I will try to evolve my research into something that builds on my thesis work but adds a new angle.

The Envisioning Contestability Loops article mentioned in previous updates is now in press with She Ji, which I am very pleased about. It should be published “soon.”

Upcoming appearances include a brief talk on participatory AI at a Cities Coalition for Digital Rights event and a presentation as part of a panel on The Mutual Shaping Of Democratic Practices And AI at TILTing Perspectives 2024.

That’s it for this final PhD update. I will probably continue these posts under a new title. We’ll see.

AI pedagogy through a design lens

At a TU Delft spring symposium on AI education, Hosana and I ran a short workshop titled “AI pedagogy through a design lens.” In it, we identified some of the challenges facing AI teaching, particularly outside of computer science, and explored how design pedagogy, particularly the practices of studios and making, may help to address them. The AI & Society master elective I’ve been developing and teaching over the past five years served as a case study. The session was punctuated by brief brainstorming using an adapted version of the SQUID gamestorming technique. Below are the slides we used.

AI pedagogy through a design lensDownload

Participatory AI literature review

I’ve been thinking alot about civic participation in machine learning systems development. In particular, involving non-experts in the potentially value-laden translation work from specifications that engineers do when they build their models. Below is a summary of a selection of literature I found on the topic, which may serve as a jumping-off point for future research.

Abstract

The literature on participatory artificial intelligence (AI) reveals a complex landscape marked by challenges and evolving methodologies. Feffer et al. (2023) critique the reduction of participation to computational mechanisms that only approximate narrow moral values. They also note that engagements with stakeholders are often superficial and unrepresentative. Groves et al. (2023) identify significant barriers in commercial AI labs, including high costs, fragmented approaches, exploitation concerns, lack of transparency, and contextual complexities. These barriers lead to a piecemeal approach to participation with minimal impact on decision-making in AI labs. Delgado et al. (2023) observe that participatory AI involves stakeholders mostly in a consultative role without integrating them as active decision-makers throughout the AI design lifecycle.

Gerdes (2022) proposes a data-centric approach to AI ethics and underscores the need for interdisciplinary bridge builders to reconcile different stakeholder perspectives. Robertson et al. (2023) explore participatory algorithm design, emphasizing the need for preference languages that balance expressiveness, cost, and collectivism—Sloane et al. (2020) caution against “participation washing” and the potential for exploitative community involvement. Bratteteig & Verne (2018) highlight AI’s challenges to traditional participatory design (PD) methods, including unpredictable technological changes and a lack of user-oriented evaluation. Birhane et al. (2022) call for a clearer understanding of meaningful participation, advocating for a shift towards vibrant, continuous engagement that enhances community knowledge and empowerment. The literature suggests a pressing need for more effective, inclusive, and empowering participatory approaches in AI development.

Bibliography

  1. Birhane, A., Isaac, W., Prabhakaran, V., Diaz, M., Elish, M. C., Gabriel, I., & Mohamed, S. (2022). Power to the People? Opportunities and Challenges for Participatory AI. Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization, 1–8. https://doi.org/10/grnj99
  2. Bratteteig, T., & Verne, G. (2018). Does AI make PD obsolete?: Exploring challenges from artificial intelligence to participatory design. Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Situated Actions, Workshops and Tutorial – Volume 2, 1–5. https://doi.org/10/ghsn84
  3. Delgado, F., Yang, S., Madaio, M., & Yang, Q. (2023). The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization, 1–23. https://doi.org/10/gs8kvm
  4. Ehsan, U., & Riedl, M. O. (2020). Human-Centered Explainable AI: Towards a Reflective Sociotechnical Approach. In C. Stephanidis, M. Kurosu, H. Degen, & L. Reinerman-Jones (Eds.), HCI International 2020—Late Breaking Papers: Multimodality and Intelligence (pp. 449–466). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10/gskmgf
  5. Feffer, M., Skirpan, M., Lipton, Z., & Heidari, H. (2023). From Preference Elicitation to Participatory ML: A Critical Survey & Guidelines for Future Research. Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 38–48. https://doi.org/10/gs8kvx
  6. Gerdes, A. (2022). A participatory data-centric approach to AI Ethics by Design. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 36(1), 2009222. https://doi.org/10/gs8kt4
  7. Groves, L., Peppin, A., Strait, A., & Brennan, J. (2023). Going public: The role of public participation approaches in commercial AI labs. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 1162–1173. https://doi.org/10/gs8kvs
  8. Robertson, S., Nguyen, T., Hu, C., Albiston, C., Nikzad, A., & Salehi, N. (2023). Expressiveness, Cost, and Collectivism: How the Design of Preference Languages Shapes Participation in Algorithmic Decision-Making. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–16. https://doi.org/10/gr6q2t
  9. Sloane, M., Moss, E., Awomolo, O., & Forlano, L. (2020). Participation is not a Design Fix for Machine Learning. arXiv:2007.02423 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02423
  10. Zytko, D., J. Wisniewski, P., Guha, S., P. S. Baumer, E., & Lee, M. K. (2022). Participatory Design of AI Systems: Opportunities and Challenges Across Diverse Users, Relationships, and Application Domains. Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–4. https://doi.org/10/gs8kv6

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/

I might start using this place more frequently again. Mostly for microblogging of interesting things I notice that are related to my research. I dunno.

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.