The ubiquity and power of machine learning models in society to determine and control an increasing number of real-world decisions presents a challenge.  D&S fellow Sorelle Friedler and a team of researchers have developed ... Read on arXiv

D&S Researcher Madeleine Clare Elish considers the possibility of a full-on replacement of humans by robots. She argues that this scenario is nowhere near as close as we have been led to believe. Though algorithms can do an... Read on Slate

Political actors around the world are beginning to use social bots—automated software programs designed to interact with and imitate human users–to manipulate public opinion. Social bots have been used across numerous online pl... Read more

Saiph Savage's “Activist Bots: Helpful But Missing Human Love?” is an output of a weeklong workshop at Data & Society that was led by “Provocateur-in-Residence” Sam Woolley and brought together a group of experts to get a b... Read on Points

In this op-ed, Data & Society fellow Seeta Peña Gangadharan addresses the question "Can Crime Be Ethically Predicted?" and argues that bias is inherent in the technical systems used in predictive policing leading to "fundam... Read on New York Times

Predictive policing refers to the use of analytical techniques to make statistical predictions about potential criminal activity. The basic underlying assumption of predictive policing is that crime is not randomly distributed ... Read more

Data & Society's Intelligence and Autonomy initiative commissioned authors to envision future scenarios for intelligent systems in four domains: medicine, labor, urban design, and warfare. The future scenario around labo... Read on Quartz

"In a self-driving car, the control of the vehicle is shared between the driver and the car’s software. How the software behaves is in turn controlled — designed — by the software engineers. It’s no longer true to say that the ... Read on Quartz

D&S fellow Sorelle Friedler and her research colleagues investigate the ways that algorithms make decisions in all aspects of our lives and whether or not we can determine if these algorithms are biased, involve illegal dis... Read on arXiv.org

How we think about data — and more importantly what we do with it — will depend on the value systems that our conceptual metaphors capture and reify. Much of the rhetoric surrounding data draws on metaphors that privilege an in... Read more