Good Systems is hosting a fireside chat with Tim Hwang, director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, and Professor Sharon Strover from the Moody College of Communication. Dubbed “The Busiest Man on the Internet” by Forbes, Hwang researches and writes about the social implications of artificial intelligence. Before joining the Harvard-MIT initiative, he served as Google’s global public policy lead on AI. His current work focuses on the geopolitical aspects of computational power and ensuring social justice in machine learning applications. Following the fireside chat, we invite everyone to attend a reception to meet the Good Systems research team and learn about projects that will be launching this year. UT faculty and staff will also have the opportunity to network with colleagues from around campus and find out what opportunities exist for participating in this grand challenge. This is a free event, but space is limited, so please reserve your spot today.

The City of Austin and partners across Central Texas are excited to invite you to our first Civic Futures Summit on October 1st and 2nd. Join us in Austin for five tracks of workshops, a mainstage program featuring speakers from across the country, and the Civic Futures Awards featuring some of the best work from across the region.

Our world is increasingly digital and connected, and data is being produced at extraordinary, exponentially increasing rates. As a result, data analytics and artificial intelligence are enabling improvements in everything from product design to business operations, from customer experiences to civic engagement. And new societal transformations powered by data and analytics on the horizon, including autonomous vehicles, and smart and safe buildings and cities. However, with growing concerns around personal privacy, data security, and the power of influence that data and AI provide, many are wondering what the future holds for our society. Can our governance structures—laws, ordinances, policies, procedures, and even cultural norms—evolve rapidly enough? What is the balance between social good and potential risks and dangers? Join us as we address these concerns by hosting a debate with technology and policy leaders with wide-ranging perspectives to talk about the implications of data, personal privacy, and ethics of new technologies that will shape our future.

Join UC Santa Barbara Professor Alan Liu as he leads a discussion about multi-disciplinary perspectives as they relate to critical infrastructure studies. He'll talk about why these different academic perspectives — sometimes divergent even in their quest to come together — are needed to imagine a good infrastructure as the foundation for a "good system." In the case of "Bridging Barriers" Grand Challenges initiative, for example, how many different ways are there to understand what a bridge or a barrier is good for (and for whom)?

The Good Systems grand challenge team is partnering with Facebook Developer Circles and the City of Austin to host a hackathon that focuses on creating positive change in communities: hackers will design socio-technical solutions that can foster sustained and constructive civic engagement among residents.

Please join us Friday, April 26, for a research showcase in engineering's beautiful Mulva Auditorium. Planet Texas 2050 researchers and community partner organizations will present their work from the first year and reflect on how we're doing and where we're going as an interdisciplinary grand challenge. We'll also demonstrate tools and approaches we're developing and we'll have a mini “field trip” to Waller Creek. This will be an interactive event with oral and poster presentations as well as discussion sessions and opportunities for feedback. We want to show you the progress we're making and meet with potential partners who might join us on future projects. Click here to register and learn more.

Ubiquitous recorders are capturing our daily sounds on the street, at our work and leisure places, and in our homes. The study of the cultural, political, ethical, and technological impact of automating sound and incorporating it into different systems is in its infancy, and scholars and technologists often do not have a good understanding of what kind of data, what kind of techniques and algorithms, and what kinds of interpretations can be drawn from audio data in systems that use A.I. technologies. This event is part of our Acoustic Surveillance and Big Data Series. In this talk, Doug Oard will review the technologies that have brought us these challenges and opportunities, and he'll identify some remaining technical challenges that currently limit their reach and application. He will then focus on the interplay between technology and policy that will shape the ways in which we might seek to achieve a balance between the risks and benefits that this cornucopia of new information could offer.

Ubiquitous recorders are capturing our daily sounds on the street, at our work and leisure places, and in our homes. The study of the cultural, political, ethical, and technological impact of automating sound and incorporating it into different systems is in its infancy, and scholars and technologists often do not have a good understanding of what kind of data, what kind of techniques and algorithms, and what kinds of interpretations can be drawn from audio data in systems that use A.I. technologies. This event is part of our Acoustic Surveillance and Big Data Series and will ask participants to identify their research objectives with sound and use computational analytics to analyze sound files. Questions to consider will include what is the nature of the quantification of sound? What does it mean to break sound down into feature sets for big data analysis? 

Led by Professor Robin Mansell from the London School of Economics and Political Science. We will examine a fundamentally important question for the future of society: Is there ever likely to be an effective challenge to the pursuit of wealth through inequitable mass individualization? The ‘platformization of everything’ — by Google, Baidu, Facebook, Amazon and a few others — is implicated in the spread of misinformation and in the deepening of many kinds of inequalities. This lecture explores reasons for the persistence of cautious and relatively weak policy responses to platform power and whether a turn to radical democratic theory and practice might help to promote policy responses that work as a counterpoint to platform dominance. This event is part of the Digital Media Speaker Series and is sponsored by the Technology and Information Policy Institute (TIPI) and Good Systems.