The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its 2020 MacArthur Fellows, which include two BKC Faculty Associates, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Mary Gray. Watch Cottom and Gray discuss their previous and forthcoming projects as well as explore the intersections of their equally impressive research. The event was moderated by Joan Donovan. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science and senior research fellow with the Center for...

How Should U.S. public health officials lead in this political moment? Rivka Weinberg, Professor of Philosophy at Scripps College and Jennifer Prah Ruger, Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, join Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, to discuss the Covid State of Play.

Board Members James Mickens and Jonathan Zittrain explore cybersecurity beyond its traditional boundaries of protecting data or code from bad actors. Increasingly, the pervasive integration of computing systems into modern societal processes (e.g. news, election results) creates new tensions such as the exponential growth of disinformation. After all, disinformation stems from issues about how users are authenticated and what abilities they are granted on a given network. These challenges...

What’s the Covid State of Play? Joseph Allen, professor and head of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, joins Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, to discuss the issues of ventilation and airborne transmission of the virus, the unique challenges and risks posed by school reopenings, and possible solutions.

What’s the Covid State of Play? Join Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, as they try to untangle the challenges in the fight against COVID-19 in a chat with former NSC pandemic policy staffer Beth Cameron and Chief of Strategy and Policy for Partners in Health's MA COVID-19 Response KJ Seung. Zittrain, Bourdeaux, and Cameron recently published a call to U.S. governors for a coordinated...

The pandemic is a portal, the novelist Arundhati Roy wrote in an essay for the Financial Times. “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” In many ways, the coronavirus pandemic has resurfaced and amplified the worst in the world: intensification of...

Low-income countries have several systemic disadvantages that cumulatively inhibit their capacity to cope with the spread of COVID-19. These systemic disadvantages, a result of long-term poverty and resource-constrained healthcare systems, are further worsened by other socio-economic outcomes of lockdowns and the spread of infection. BKC hosted a seminar on the economic and healthcare fallouts of COVID-19 in low-income countries, with a specific focus on groups such as women, refugees, and...

Ever since Florida 2000, it seems the US cannot hold an election without horror stories about equipment failing, votes lost, and disenfranchised voters says Ben Adida, co-founder and Executive Director of VotingWorks. "Why does a country as powerful and resourceful as the United States have so much trouble running an election?" is a central question to this virtual event. In "Building Better Voting Systems," Adida discusses why running an election in the US is particularly challenging. He...

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) sweeps the world in devastating fashion, scientists are scrambling to develop effective vaccines and treatments. But how should those medicines be priced globally? Following Donald Trump’s “America First” policy with respect to vaccine and drug pricing would be tragic, argue Quentin Palfrey and John Stubbs. Instead, Palfrey and Stubbs propose a pharmaceutical pricing policy modeled on progressive taxation to distribute costs equitably worldwide. This...

Governments and publics are increasingly asking that tech companies work to address the challenges and adapt to the changes technology has unleashed, from digital security to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the core of these new expectations is the sense that world-changing technologies must be governed in accordance with a broad ethic of responsibility – to individual users and to society at large. In this conversation, Jonathan Zittrain was joined by Microsoft President Brad Smith...

As people turn to news outlets for information, journalists -- and data journalists in particular -- are under pressure to make sense of droves of complicated information. Data Overload discusses the challenges journalists face obtaining, analyzing, and explaining data about the current pandemic. Todd Wallack, a Berkman Klein-Nieman Fellow and data journalist at the Boston Globe, is joined by Caroline Chen, who covers health care for ProPublica, and Armand Emamdjomeh, an assignment editor,...

Fairness and discrimination in algorithmic systems are globally recognized as topics of critical importance. To date, the majority of work in this area starts from an American regulatory perspective defined by the notions of ‘disparate treatment’ and ‘disparate impact.’ But European legal notions of discrimination are not equivalent. In this talk, Sandra Wachter, Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Law and Ethics of AI, Big Data,...

The identification of bots is an important and complicated task. The bot classifier Botometer was successfully introduced as a way to estimate the number of bots in a given list of accounts and has been frequently used in academic publications. Given its relevance for academic research, and our understanding of the presence of automated accounts in any given Twitter discourse, Adrian Rauchfleisch and Jonas Kaiser studied Botometer's diagnostic ability over time. To do so, Rauchfleisch and...

This virtual talk features Jessica Fjeld, assistant director of the Cyberlaw Clinic and lead author on the “Principled AI” report, in conversation with Ryan Budish, an assistant research director at Berkman Klein and a member of OECD’s AI Governance Expert Group, which proposed high-level AI principles. Fjeld and Budish discuss AI principles both generally (the high-level landscape in which they exist) and in practice (the creation and implementation process for principles.)

“In our data-driven society, it is too easy to assume the transparency of data. Instead, we should approach data sets with an awareness that they are created by humans and their dutiful machines, at a time, in a place, with the instruments at hand, for audiences that are conditioned to receive them,” says Yanni Alexander Loukissas, Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. All data are local. The term data set implies...

Rural broadband is currently having a moment in American political discourse. No less than 5 presidential candidates have released plans to connect the country’s rural places, and the FCC has recently announced a $20billion funding program for fixed broadband and a $9billion program for 5G deployment in rural America. Despite these initiatives and interests, however, rural America remains woefully disconnected from a digital world that the urban and wealthy take for granted. Worse yet, the...

Dr. Howard Stevenson of the University of Pennsylvania kicked off the Berkman Klein Spring 2020 Luncheon Series with a talk and discussion on Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech. Racial literacy provides a framework for considering how to combat the proliferation of racially-biased technology. Dr. Stevenson was joined in conversation by Jessie Daniels and Mutale Nkonde. Dr. Howard Stevenson is the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education, Professor of Africana Studies, in the Human...

Our current legal system is to a great extent the product of an earlier period of social and economic transformation. From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, the U.S. legal system underwent profound, tectonic shifts. Today, struggles over ownership of information-age resources and accountability for information-age harms are producing new systemic changes. In Between Truth and Power, Julie E. Cohen explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and...

A new book by BKC Faculty Associate and Youth & Media team member Leah Plunkett joins works by Margaret Atwood and Stephen King on Wired's list of "must-read" books for fall 2019. Leah's book from MIT Press, Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online, "illuminates children's digital footprints: the digital baby monitors, the daycare livestreams, the nurse's office health records, the bus and cafeteria passes recording their travel and consumption patterns―all...

This panel discussion will address the topic of “Napster @ 20,” looking back from our vantage point in 2019 and examining the direct and indirect legacy of Napster over the past two decades. The panelists are Christopher Bavitz, Nancy Baym, David Herlihy, and Jennifer Jenkins. For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/napster20-reflections-internets-most-controversial-music-file-sharing-service

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was delighted to welcome the President of Germany, Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to campus for a special event on November 1 to discuss the Ethics of the Digital Transformation. Parts of this recording are in German. For more information, visithttps://cyber.harvard.edu/events/ethics-digital-transformation

In this talk, Martin Garbus shares his truth: from representing criminal murder defendants, to representing detained migrants, to the internet’s effect on justice. When a lawyer must choose between giving a truth that will lead to injustice or lying to pursue justice, what are his obligations? For more information, visithttps://cyber.harvard.edu/events/north-havana-lawyers-truth

Israel went through two full election campaigns in 2019, featuring the cutting edge of network propaganda technologies. Justice Hanan Melcer of Israel's Supreme Court chaired Israel's Central Elections Committee during both elections and speaks about his experiences managing the two election cycles and ruling on campaign practices as they unfolded in real-time. For more information about this event, including a transcript,...

Niva Elkin-Koren addresses issues in AI-based content moderation by introducing an adversarial procedure, the strategy of “Contesting Algorithms,” and discussing its promises and limitations. For more information about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/contesting-algorithms

This talk features Megan Phelps-Roper and Brittan Heller in discussion about Phelps-Roper's new book Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church.