Berkman Center Events & Webcasts

Berkman Center Luncheon Series
Guest: Danielle Citron of UMD Law School
Topic: “Technological Due Process”

Tuesday, January 15, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

“Technological Due Process”

Today, computer systems make decisions about important individual rights—they terminate Medicaid benefits, decide who is not allowed to fly commercial airlines, and mislabel individuals as dead-beat parents. Last century’s due process norms, however, are ill-suited to protect individuals from arbitrary agency action. At the same time, automation impairs participatory rulemaking, the traditional stand-in for individualized due process. My piece develops a new model of procedural regularity and policy-making that can operate when pivotal government decisions are made by automated systems and the programmers who design them.

About Danielle

Danielle Citron is an Assistant Professor of Law, originally joining the faculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2004. She teaches Civil Procedure, Information Privacy Law, LAWR I, and Appellate Advocacy. She was voted the “Best Teacher of the Year” by the University of Maryland law school students in 2005.

Professor Citron’s scholarly interests include information technology’s transformative effect on law and legal theory. Her article, “Minimum Contacts in a Borderless World: Voice over Internet Protocol and the Coming Implosion of Personal Jurisdiction Theory,” appeared in the U.C. Davis Law Review in 2006. Her article, “Reservoirs of Danger: The Evolution of Public and Private Law at the Dawn of the Information Age,” was published by the Southern California Law Review in 2007. Her most recent work includes “Technological Due Process,” which will appear in the Washington University Law Review and “Open Code Governance,” which will be published by the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

More: http://www.law.umaryland.edu/faculty_profile.asp?facultynum=028

Berkman Center Luncheon Series
Guest: Deb Roy of MIT
Topic: “The Human Speechome Project”

Tuesday, January 8, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

“The Human Speechome Project”

The Human Speechome Project is an effort to observe and computationally model the longitudinal course of language development of one child at an unprecedented scale. We are collecting audio and video recordings for the first two to three years of one child’s life, in its near entirety, as it unfolds in the child’s home. To analyze the resulting massive audio-visual corpus, we are developing new data mining technologies to help human analysts rapidly annotate and transcribe recordings using semi-automatic methods, and to detect and visualize salient patterns of behavior and interaction. To make sense of large-scale patterns that span across months or even years of observations, we will develop computational models of language acquisition that are able to learn from the child’s experiential record. I will describe the methodology for ultra-dense in vivo data collection (including privacy management), preliminary data analysis tools, and sketch our plans for expanding the effort beyond N=1 for the purpose of understanding and treating developmental disorders such as autism.

Links

About the project: http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/projects/hsp.html
Webpage: http://web.media.mit.edu/~dkroy/bio.html

About Deb

Deb Roy directs the Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines group, and is Chair of the Academic Program in Media Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on the interaction of language with physical and social context, which he explores through the construction of robots, video games, and the study of child language acquisition. Roy has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, cognitive modeling, human-machine interaction, data mining and visualization, and machine learning. He has served as guest editor for the journal Artificial Intelligence and is an Associate of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. His work has been featured in mainstream media including NPR, BBC News, Wired Magazine, Science Magazine, New Scientist, Technology Review, PC Magazine, and Popular Science. Roy holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and both an MS and PhD in media arts and sciences from MIT.

Berkman Center Luncheon Series
Guest: Victoria Stodden of Stanford University
Topic: “The Internet and Democracy: Problems and Ideas”

Tuesday, December 18, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

The Internet has enormous potential: it can educate voters on issues, provide tools for self expression to both peers and to policy makers, and even spread ideas about democratic notions themselves. This talk examines the benefits and pitfalls of these aspects and argues a successful approach to understanding the phenomena will address the problems created by the Internet as well as its potential.

About Victoria

Victoria Stodden recently finished her Statistics Ph.D. with Professor David Donoho at Stanford University. She is currently enrolled in the Law School and is teaching two classes there (Law 374 Empirical Legal Analysis and Law 468 Statistical Inference) as a Lecturer in Law. Victoria also completed a master’s degree in statistics at Stanford University, as well as a master’s degree in economics from the University of British Columbia.

In the summer of 2000, she was an intern at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Labs in New York working on speech recognition. She passed her qualifying exams in summer 2001. In the summer of 2002 Victoria worked on Optical Character Recognition at PARC.com (formerly Xerox PARC) in Palo Alto. Since then she has taught stats212, Applied Statistics with SAS, a new course she developed here in this department.

Links

Victoria’s Homepage: http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/

Webcast

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman.