Past Lectures
The SFI hosts lecture events that bring a wide range of thinkers and writers to the University of Pittsburgh. Past lectures have addressed topics such as scientific work processes, design, emerging technologies, information policy, human-machine relationships, knowledge work, ethics, and privacy.
2023:
Dr. Katie Shilton, University of Maryland (January 31, 2023)
Excavating Awareness and Power: A Decision Tool to Rebuild Trust in Data Science
Data scientists using big, pervasive data about people face a significant challenge: navigating norms and practices for ethical and trustworthy data use. In response, the PERVADE project has conducted research with data scientists, data subjects, and regulators, and has discovered two entwined trust problems: participant unawareness of such research, and the relationship of social data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. In response, we have developed a decision support tool for researchers, inspired by research practices in a related but perhaps surprising research discipline: ethnography. This talk will introduce PERVADE's research findings and the resulting decision support tool prototype, and discuss ways that researchers working with pervasive data can incorporate reflection on awareness and power into their research.
Bio: Katie Shilton is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on technology and data ethics. She is the PI of the PERVADE project, a multi-campus collaboration focused on big data research ethics. Other projects include improving online content moderation with human-in-the-loop machine learning techniques; analyzing values in audiology technologies and treatment models; and designing experiential data ethics education. She is the founding co-director of the University of Maryland’s undergraduate major in social data science. Her work has been supported by multiple awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Katie received a B.A. from Oberlin College, a Master of Library and Information Science from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Information Studies from UCLA.
View the recording.
2022:
Dr. Nicole Martinez-Martin
Embracing Privacy and Equity for Digital Mental Health
Digital mental health technologies, such as mental health apps and wearables, are expected to provide much-needed improvements in diagnosis, access and treatment for mental health care. However, issues of privacy and equity need to be actively engaged in the development of digital mental health so that these tools do not amplify and exacerbate existing inequities in mental health care. Minoritized subpopulations are under-represented in the research and development process for digital mental health development, which leads to tools that do not serve the needs of diverse communities and populations. Drawing from qualitative interviews conducted with digital mental health technology developers, clinicians, and users, I will examine challenges for developing tools that support privacy, access and equity in digital mental health.
Dr. Nicole Martinez-Martin is an assistant professor at Stanford's Center for Biomedical Ethics. She has a law degree and a doctorate in social sciences. Her research interests include the ethics of AI in healthcare, digital health technologies, and the ethics of mental health care.
This event was sponsored by the Sara Fine Institute with the Center for Bioethics and Health Law and the Research, Ethics and Society Initative at Pitt. Please contact for a recording.
Dr. Sharon Leon, Michigan State University
From Scholar to System to Scale: Generating Meso-level Historical Data to Recover the Lived Experiences of Enslaved People
How shall we represent their lives? The careful and responsible representation of what we can know about the lived experiences of the enslaved is a central focus of current digital work both for historians and for library and archives professionals. In attempting to answer that question, this talk will trace Leon's interconnected research agenda through three distinct but related projects: 1) an individual project focused on enslaved people in Maryland: Life and Labor Under Slavery: the Jesuit Plantation Project; 2) a collaborative effort to develop and test a linked data ontology to represent the experiences of the enslaved people who labored for educational institutions in the US: On These Grounds: Slavery and the University; and 3) a linked data driven web publishing platform: Omeka S. In reflecting on these projects, Leon will explore the ways that this work contributes both to slavery studies and to critical archival studies, and how it offers a potential model for future interdisciplinary collaborations.
Hosted by the Bernadette Callery Archives Lecture Series and the Sara Fine Institute of the Pitt School of Computing and Information.
Sarah Igo, Andrew Jackson Professor of History and Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the School of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University
Infrastructure and Identities: The Many Lives of the SSN
What can the Social Security number tell us about the ways people have across the last century imagined their affiliation to the U.S. state—as well as to their own “personal” data? In this talk, Sarah Igo charts Americans’ relationship to their 9-digit identifier in order to explore the technologies of citizenship buried in bureaucratic paperwork.
2020:
Matthew H. Rafalow, UC-Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society and Google
Education researchers struggle with the fact that students arrive at school already shaped by their unequal childhoods. Would we see greater gains among less privileged students if they had a more level playing field?
This talk draws on a comparative ethnographic study of three middle schools to address this question, focusing the case of digital technology use. In the contemporary moment, kids’ digital skills appear in the form of their digital play with peers, like through social media use, video gaming, and creating online content. Drawing on six hundred hours of observation and over one hundred interviews with teachers, administrators, and students, I show how teachers treat these very similar digital skills differently by school demographic. I also illustrate the ways these social forces at school shape students' participation online, in and outside of school. The book updates class-focused theories of cultural inequality by showing how race and racism, as well as school organizational culture, determine whether students’ digital skills can help them get ahead.
View the recording here.
2016:
Christine L. Borgman, Center for Knowledge Infrastructures at UCLA (February 29, 2016)
“Big Data, Open Data, and Scholarship”
Scholars gathered data long before the emergence of books, journals, libraries, publishers, or the Internet. Until recently, data were considered part of the process of scholarship, essential but largely invisible. In the “big data” era, the products of these research processes have become valuable objects in themselves to be captured, shared, reused, and sustained for the long term. Data also has become contentious intellectual property to be protected, whether for proprietary, confidentiality, competition, or other reasons. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely with the public investment necessary to sustain access. Enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. This talk will explore the stakes and stakeholders in research data and implications for policy and practice.
2015:
Alondra Nelson, Columbia University (March 31, 2015)
“The Social Life of DNA in the Era of Big Data”
This SFI lecture will focus on the expansive use of genetic ancestry testing, the 2013 controversy over the decoding of the genome of Henrietta Lacks, the growing phenomenon of familial searching in the criminal justice system, and ideas of compound racialization in the era of big data.
Alondra Nelson is dean of Social Sciences and professor of sociology & gender studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and inequality. Her books include Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History; Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination; and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Her latest book, The Social Life of DNA, will be published next year. She is presently engaged in new ethnographic research that examines grassroots responses to the STEM field crisis. Nelson is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford, Wilson, and Mellon Foundations. She has been a visiting fellow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Medicine, the BIOS Center at the London School of Economics, and the Bavarian American Academy. She sits on the editorial board of Social Studies of Science and serves as an advisor to the Data & Society Research Institute.
2014: Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University (November 6, 2014)
“Sensing War at the Interface”
This talk sets out the motivating questions and initial analytic framing of my research in progress on the problem of ‘situational awareness’ within contemporary of (particularly U.S.) warfare. My focus is on the interfaces that configure war fighters to ‘recognition’ of relevant subjects and objects, including the of us and them that are prerequisites for defensible killing.’m interested more specifically in the logics and material practices of remotely-controlled weapon systems (particularly armed drones and weaponized robots), and military training simulations, configurations reveal complex relations of mediation and embodiment, distance and proximity, vulnerability and impunity that comprise contemporary warfare, as the virtual is infused with real figurations with their own material effects, and the real environments of war fighting are increasingly virtual. The primary empirical basis for this research is archive of, an immersive training environment developed between 2001 and as the flagship project of the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies.read the project through a frame inspired by Judith’s theoretical analysis of figuration’s generative agencies, to try to further the training simulation’s discursive and material effects.
2013: Dr. Pamela Samuelson, UC Berkeley Law School and School of Information, “Overcoming Copyright Obstacles to Creating Digital Libraries”
2012: David H. Holtzman, former Chief Technology Officer at Network Solutions, “Stealing Digital Assets—Piracy and Privacy”
2011: Dr. Michael Christie, Charles Darwin University, “Teaching from Country: Stories and Place in a Postcolonial Australian Aboriginal Pedagogy”
2010: Dr. Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School and Berkman Center for Internet & Society, “Minds For Sale”
2008: Dr. Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School
2007: Dr. Chris Dede, Harvard Graduate School of Education