I am thrilled to share that I am reporting from Heidelberg, Germany this week where I am attending the 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum as a member of the press. The forum brings together young researchers across mathematics and computing disciplines, and distinguished Laureates that have won significant awards in the fields, to network and learn from one another. The program consists of panels, workshops, lightning discussions, poster sessions, networking opportunities, and more in the beautiful old town of Heidelberg. As a member of the press, I have the opportunity to represent CCC in interviews with many of the incredible laureates, and listen in on groundbreaking lectures and discussions about pressing […]

The CCC Council’s Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) task force, composed of Nadya Bliss, Kevin Butler, David Danks, Ufuk Topcu, and Matthew Turk, synthesized the two blog posts they released last month into a Whitepaper that has been released today. The paper compels computing researchers to mitigate future potential harms of their technology by anticipating privacy and security concerns, bias’, and more.  Read this fascinating paper, titled “Addressing the Unforeseen Harms of Technology”, here.

The following blog post was written by CCC’s Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) Task Force This article is the second of two related blog posts on proactively addressing the unforeseen harms of technology. In the previous post, we discussed the importance of addressing the negative consequences of technology and the difference between genuinely unforeseen risks and those that could have been foreseen but remained unacted upon. In this article, we will discuss the importance of proactively designing technology to reduce the potential for both foreseen and unforeseen negative consequences. Mitigating risks in the design phase is a common tenet of software engineering. A 2002 report from the […]

The following blog post was written by CCC’s Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) Task Force Computing technologies of all stripes have brought enormous benefits to people’s lives, but also significant individual and societal harms. As these technologies become increasingly ubiquitous and powerful, we should expect the potential benefits and harms to grow as well. These shifts raise crucial questions about the foreseeability of impacts of the work of computing researchers and developers, as it is much easier to promote benefits and mitigate harms when they can be anticipated. We can ensure wide access (if beneficial), establish guardrails (if problematic), and much more, but only if we actually […]

Recent years have seen increased awareness of the potential negative impacts of computing technologies, and yet these harms are often unforeseen when the technology is first deployed. The CCC Council formed a task force on Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) to investigate possible harmful consequences of computing technology, to what extent these outcomes could have been mitigated or avoided, and who should be responsible for negative impacts. The task force, composed of Nadya Bliss, Kevin Butler, David Danks, Ufuk Topcu, and Matthew Turk, brings together diverse expertise across cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, data science, philosophy/ethics, computer vision, and autonomous systems. The group also spoke with multiple […]

In November 2023, CCC hosted a workshop on “The Future of Research on Social Technologies” in Washington, DC. The event, also supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, addressed the past, present and future of social technologies research. The workshop brought together over 50 information and computer scientists, social scientists, communication and journalism scholars, and policy experts. The workshop was organized by Motahhare Eslami (Carnegie Mellon University), Eric Gilbert (University of Michigan), and Sarita Schoenebeck (University of Michigan). The workshop organizers, along with nine workshop participants, wrote a fascinating workshop report based on workshop discussions that has been released today. The report explores what we do not know […]