interested in accessibility, visualization, and data ethics? i'm recruiting phd students to join
@cudatadesign
.
we're building a collaborative and inclusive space for people to grow into interdisciplinary researchers of technology and society.
hi! i will be presenting this work at
#chi2024
next week.
i'm also pleased to share that i will be joining the faculty at
@cuinfoscience
in 2025, and intend to recruit students soon.
my dms are open if you'd like to chat at the conference. thanks!
today on MIT news, new work on Umwelt, a tool for accessible interactive data analysis that de-centers visualization by treating visuals, text, and sound as equal representations
@BKCHarvard
is delighted to announce our 2024-25 fellows! This yearβs cohort brings expertise in AI policy, journalism, psychology, math, music, and more. Read more about their research and experiences here: .
Congratulations to those selected! ππ
π«·In βData Refusal From Below: A Framework for Understanding, Evaluating, & Envisioning Refusal as Design,β '22 Design Felow J. Zong & co-authorΒ J. N. Matias, examine how the notion of refusal opens new avenues in the field of data ethics.
@ohnobackspace
today on MIT news, new work on Umwelt, a tool for accessible interactive data analysis that de-centers visualization by treating visuals, text, and sound as equal representations
i got covid at
#chi2024
--- my first confirmed positive test : \ i literally just had the flu two weeks ago too
kinda mad at myself for getting complacent tbh
breaking my twitter hiatus to tell you that the rumors are true. come see BODY TEXT, a "graphic design exhibition", jan 15-feb 7 at the mit wiesner gallery!
it is less than a week out from my phd defense, i am sicker than i have been in recent memory, and probably the only thing keeping me going right now is "everybody do the wenis"
i'm finding recently that making sure i get to do work that i truly enjoy often just means giving myself twice the workload of a reasonable person. i'm still not sure how to feel about this.
Weβre told so often as academics that our love of the work is compensation for taking a big pay cut from what weβd get in βindustryβ, but then we all spend so much time doing busy work we donβt love. So ask yourself, did the work you do today compensate you fully for your time?
what does it mean to let AI control our affect? critics of gmail's smart reply feature are concerned that it sanitizes our language in a way that makes email correspondence insincere and impersonal
so i added some bad words π introducing rude gmail
what are your favorite research group / lab websites?
bonus points if you can tell me a bit about why, and what audiences they do a particularly good job of serving
thanks : )
"At the Media Lab, I learned that the discourse of βethical AI,β championed substantially by Ito, was aligned strategically with a Silicon Valley effort seeking to avoid legally enforceable restrictions of controversial technologies."
In the Boston/Cambridge area next week? You are invited to participate in a user study to test a new tool for designing interactive data visualizations. Please fill out the following form to participate:
π
enjoyed the dance performance at the
#CSCW2018
banquet! I crave opportunities to use my art degree so will share my armchair reading of the performance π 1/
so, the hawaii thing follows in a long history of poor user interface design with disastrous consequences (iran air 655, three mile island). what i'm afraid of is the powers that be will fire someone and stop thinking about it, when it really could've been anyone in that position
The people who set agendas, who decide the rules of the game [...] have a special kind of authority. They decide [...] the institutional arena in which popular contention happens. This agenda-setting is sometimes called the hidden, βsecond faceβ of power.
just learned about the ivy league nude posture photo scandal, an incredible story of unethical institutional data collection led by a physiognomist ... like is this for real
i hope things like the nuclear warning system don't get perpetually de-prioritized for sexy civilian-facing civic products. infrastructure doesn't grab headlines, maintenance isn't sexy, but our lives inextricably depend on that type of quiet labor
there didn't really end up a way to acknowledge this in my show, but i was reading a lot of tim ingold while trying to parse out the narrative of BODY TEXT. here's a diagram from the article "Tools for the Hand, Language for the Face"
you: oo free coffee
me, an intellectual: surveillance capitalism is a mode of capitalist accumulation premised on the commodification of digital traces and identifiers. in this essay i will
"I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And itβs taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset."
You need to read this article. If you're a millennial who is exhausted by the thought of going to the post office, if you're a boomer infuriated by your kid's "laziness," you NEED TO READ THIS.
I'm inarticulate with feelings. This is generation-defining.
is the bitter taste in my mouth the pax or is it the idea that a central activity of my profession will require me to take ongoing health risks as nothing changes for the foreseeable future
tonight! i'm sure you already know this but my show is NOT in the "list gallery" in the "wiesner building" (nice of you to assume that my dreams came true though) it is instead in the "wiesner gallery" in the "stratton student center" ok see you soon!
who designs these interfaces for the government? i'd love to hear from someone who knows. my fear is that it's a nesting doll of sub-sub-sub-contractors
just searching the hashtag, most of the tweets by white people are like "wow, it thinks i'm a businessman! i guess i like business!". it's going viral the way other AI toys have, by appealing to the structure of social media i.e. people's desire to draw attention to themselves.
"Unsurprisingly, the report makes virtually no mention of the material harm that MIT inflicted upon the world and Epsteinβs countless victims by enabling him and lending him credibility; rather it focuses solely on the effects to MITβs community and reputation."
TIL not only do i pay $8 to MIT to email me a secure pdf of my own transcript that i then have to un-secure to upload anywhere, the reason for this is there's a third party that charges MIT for the pleasure of emailing me said transcript
framing the problem as a lack of interest in college degrees is tone-deaf and ignores the variety of complex reasons why, in reality, some people do not finish collegeβor the structural reasons they might choose not to start (yet still live a good life anyway!)
the senior survey for
@princeton
's class of 2019 was released yesterday. last year i wrote for
@nassau_weekly
about students' concerns with invasive personal questions and unclear consent procedures in the survey:
It's only designed for Chrome, but don't let that stop you from trying it in other browsers: the older, the better! Here it is in Chrome 17, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 9, and (my favorite) Internet Explorer 5.1.7 for Mac.
at visual arts class day, i reflected on the joy i found in princeton the people and place these four years. in contrast, commencement just surfaced my frustration towards princeton the institution and administrationβtheir indifference and singular focus on self-perpetuation
on wednesday, my master's student collaborator shuli will be presenting their work on customizable textual descriptions!
we also recently learned that shuli's work won an MEng thesis award from
@MITEECS
π₯³
Wed, May 15th @ 10am at
#chi2024
:
Customization is crucial for making visualizations accessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) people with widely-varying needs. But what makes for usable or useful customization?
π
#a11y
#datavis
pretty disturbed by the image-based misinformation going around about march for our lives activists. thinking about making time to read up on image manipulation detection / image authentication -- suggestions welcome ! ?
today's hobby: trying to dig for scholarly sources about robocalls. prompted by the ridiculous number of them I've gotten recently and.. apparently it's not just me
the point of this project is to demonstrate how "problematic racist labels are circulating inside major training sets." that's definitely a huge problem, and imagenet has not gotten enough attention for this! but who are we demonstrating this to?
Addendums Projects is a new initiative to mobilize digital artists and graphic designers to create issue-oriented posters for progressive state-level candidates running in the U.S. midterm elections.