Irina Shklovski

University of Copenhagen · Department of Computer Science

Mobile devices are playing an increasingly intimate role in everyday life. However, users can be surprised when in-formed of the data collection and distribution activities of apps they install. We report on two studies of smartphone users in western European countries, in which users were confronted with app behaviors and their reactions assessed....

Digital tools of research dissemination make scholarly publications accessible to the public at large through simple search engines. As a result, the users that we study, interview, and cite may be at risk of exposure to unwelcome types of scrutiny and scholars must grapple with challenges to the ethics of exposure of our re-search participants. We...

Location-based ubiquitous computing systems are entering mainstream society and becoming familiar parts of everyday life. However, the settings in which they are deployed are already suffused with complex social dynamics. We report on a study of parole officers and parolees whose relationships are being transformed by location-based technologies. W...

In this article we describe people's online contribution practices in contexts in which the government actively blocks access to or censors the Internet. We argue that people experience blocking as confusing, as a motivation for self-censorship online, as a cause of impoverishment of available content and as a real threat of personal persecution. C...

Disasters affect not only the welfare of individuals and family groups, but also the well-being of communities, and can serve as a catalyst for innovative uses of information and communication technology (ICT). In this paper, we present evidence of ICT use for re-orientation toward the community and for the production of public goods in the form of...

Sensor networks are increasingly commonplace in visions of smart cities and future healthcare systems, promising greater efficiency and increased wellbeing. However, the design of these technologies remains focused on specific users and fragmented by context, overlooking the diversity of needs, wants and values present when technologies, people, an...

This paper identifies and addresses persistent gaps in the consideration of ethical practice in ‘technology for good’ development contexts. Its main contribution is to model an integrative approach using multiple ethical frameworks to analyse and understand the everyday nature of ethical practice, including in professional practice among ‘technolog...

As more and more governments adopt algorithms to support bureaucratic decision-making processes, it becomes urgent to address issues of responsible use and accountability. We examine a contested public service algorithm used in Danish job placement for assessing an individual's risk of long-term unemployment. The study takes inspiration from cooper...

Discussions about AI development frequently bring up the question of ethics because it is difficult to predict how technological decisions might play out once AI systems are implemented and used in the world. Engineers of AI systems are increasingly expected to go beyond the traditions of requirement specifications, taking into account broader soci...

The ethics of Machine Learning has become an unavoidable topic in the AI Community. The deployment of machine learning systems in multiple social contexts has resulted in a closer ethical scrutiny of the design, development, and application of these systems. The AI/ML community has come to terms with the imperative to think about the ethical implic...

We present a methodology integrating social media data, data from qualitative research and network analysis. Qualitative insights gained from ethnographic fieldwork are used to collect and annotate social network data, and social media data is used as part of the ethnography to identify relevant actors and topics. The methodology is presented in th...

This article explores the use of participatory art and technology workshops as an approach to create more diverse and inclusive modes of engagement in the design of digital technologies. Taking the starting point in diverse works of science fiction, we draw on the concept of critical making and Ursula Le Guin’s disdain for the distinction between h...

Calls for responsible design in algorithmic decision-support systems , especially those used in public services, are increasingly common. While an algorithmic system might promise greater precision and eciency in domains such as critical care, the same eciency is dicult to replicate in the public service domain, where casework-ers must exercise dis...

Flexible electricity networks continuously coordinate and optimize operations through ICT systems. An overlay data grid conveys information about the state of the electricity grid, as well as the status of demand and production of electricity in households and industry. Data is thus the basis for decisions that affect electricity costs and availabi...

This article examines the principles outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation in the context of social network data. We provide both a practical guide to General Data Protection Regulation--compliant social network data processing, covering aspects such as data collection, consent, anonymization, and data analysis, and a broader discussio...

The future scenarios often associated with Internet of Things (IoT) oscillate between the peril of IoT for the future of humanity and the promises for an ever-connected and efficient future. Such a dichotomous positioning creates problems not only for expanding the field of application of the technology, but also ensuring ethical and responsible de...

The development of self-tracking technologies has resulted in a burst of research considering how self-tracking practices manifest themselves in everyday life. Based on a 5-month-long photo elicitation study of Danish self-trackers, we argue that no matter how committed people might be to tracking their activities, their use of self-tracking techno...

Bear & Co. is a fictitious immersion into the world of being part of an IOT start-up. We invite visitors to join the company, and facilitate their journey through various ethical conundrums, as they become part of the company. First, they must state their values - what they will bring to the company and care most about. Then, we test those values t...

Purpose Designing technologies for active and healthy ageing (AHA) requires a subtle understanding of end users (primary stakeholders) and healthcare professionals (secondary stakeholders). Often, their perspectives can be heterogeneous and contradictory. Identifying and negotiating them may be a challenge for designers. The purpose of this paper...

This article examines the principles outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the context of social network data. We provide both a practical guide to GDPR-compliant social network data processing, covering aspects such as data collection, consent, anonymization and data analysis, and a broader discussion of the problems emergin...

The future scenarios often associated with IoT oscillate between the peril of IoT for the future of humanity and the promises for an ever-connected and efficient future. Such a dichotomous positioning creates problems not only for expanding the field of application of the technology, but also ensuring ethical and responsible design and production.

Anonymization is viewed as a solution to over-exposure of personal information in a data-driven society. Yet how organizations apply anonymization techniques to data for regulatory, ethical or commercial reasons remains underexplored. We investigate how such measures are applied in organizations, asking whether anonymization practices are used, wha...

Facebook has created a complex system of controls to manage disclosure in an effort to help users address privacy concerns. Do these controls work in practice? What about controls for disclosure to Facebook itself? We explore user relationships with Facebook and its privacy mechanisms using scenario building and explored their reactions. We then co...

How do teens deal with the complexities of the digital world? Although many scholars have asked this question, few have considered not only the interpersonal concerns that loom large in the lives of teens and young adults but also their relationship with the social media platforms which have become so central to their lives. In this paper we presen...

Designers and developers are increasingly writing manifestos to express frustration and uncertainty as they struggle to negotiate between the possibilities that IoT technologies offer, and the ethical concerns they engender. Manifestos are defining of a 'moment of crisis' and their recent proliferation indicates a desire for change. We analyze the...

Studying technology use in unstable and life-threatening conditions can help highlight assumptions of use built into technologies and foreground contradictions in the design of devices and services. This paper provides an account of how soldiers, volunteers, and civilians use mobile technologies in wartime, reporting on fieldwork conducted in Weste...

In studying the increasing role that opaque, algorithmically-driven systems, such as social media feeds, play in society and people's everyday lives, user folk theories are emerging as one powerful lens with which to examine the relationship between user and algorithmic system. Folk theories allow researchers to better see from users' own perspecti...

What should be our orientation to the socio-technical as climate predictions worsen; ecological crises and wars escalate mass migration and refugee numbers; right-wing populism sweeps through politics; automation threatens workers' jobs and austerity policies destabilize society? What is to be done when it is not " business as usual " and even brok...

Workplace health and wellness programs are increasingly integrating personal health tracking technologies, such as Fitbit and Apple Watch. Many question whether these technologies truly support employees in their pursuit of better wellness levels, raising objections about workplace surveillance and further blurring of boundaries between work and pe...

Despite a proliferation of research in the use of ICTs to support active and healthy ageing, few have considered the privacy and security concerns particular to the elderly. We investigated the appropriation of tablet devices and a neighborhood portal as well as emerging privacy and security issues through ethnographic and action research in a long...

Studying in-situ technology use over time can be difficult and this is especially so when considering technologies such as activity tracking devices explicitly designed to be unobtrusive. Yet understanding activity tracking in practice is crucial, as tracking technologies become important tools for health promotion and health insurance programs. In...

Personal health technologies are increasingly introduced in workplace settings. Yet little is known about workplace implementations of activity tracker use and the kind of experiences and concerns employees might have when engaging with these technologies in practice. We report on an observational study of a Danish workplace participating in a step...

Sedentary work is a contributing factor to growing obesity levels worldwide. Research shows that step-counters can offer a way to motivate greater physical mobility. We present an in-situ study of a nation-wide workplace step-counting campaign. Our findings show that in the context of the workplace steps are a socially negotiated quantity and that...

One of the most significant contemporary technological trends is institutional adoption and use of mobile and location-based systems and services. We argue that the notion of “location” as it manifests itself in location-based systems is being produced as an object of exchange. Here we are specifically concerned with what happens to institutional r...

Location-based social network apps for dating have grown significantly over the past few years. Although they have many possible uses, casual and sexual encounters remain an important part of their draw. For CSCW, these apps are interesting to study: they offer a context to explore issues of identity and self-presentation, geography and locality, p...

HCI research has explored mobile technologies to support social activity and to support greater feelings of connectedness. Much of this has focused on different mobile devices, individual preferences and modes of use. Yet social activity and connectedness are about ongoing enactments of relationships across technologies. We propose the relational l...

Downloadable from: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/47391

It is not surprising that HCI researchers are attracted to the role of technology in global processes as many of us already live inherently transnational lives. While the notion of global connectedness is hardly new, the issues that confront us are more than specific concerns for remote migration, distributed work, or developing nations. Rather, we...

The Doctoral School initiative which was set up by the ANDROID network is a core element of the overall project that aims to strengthen the link between research and teaching in the area of disaster resilience. The mixed teaching space that we have developed as part of this ongoing project has attempted to encourage and promote the work of doct...

This document has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The contents are the sole responsibility of the Network consortium and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union

In this paper we report on the design and implementation of an initial prototype to explore how to better situate in the home social media content individually generated by family members. We considered whether existing infrastructure and practices of social media might be leveraged to offer new kinds of shared family experiences. We found that fam...

Demo Hour highlights new prototypes and projects that exemplify innovation and novel forms of interaction. Audrey Desjardins, Editor

Computing research has long been interested in location-aware mobile games, such as hybrid reality games, location-based games and urban games. With an increasingly pervasive IT infrastructure and comparatively affordable mobile devices, such games are becoming part of everyday play around the world. A study of an urban night-game called Encounter...

This paper considers how emergency response organizations utilize available social media technologies to communicate with the public in emergencies and to potentially collect valuable information using the public as sources of information on the ground. The authors discuss the use of public social media tools from the emergency management professio...

While social network capabilities are proliferating on many online services, research has focused on just a few popular social network sites. In this note, we consider a different kind of social network site, explicitly designed to support particular types of risky sexual activity among men who have sex with men (MSM). We consider the role of ambig...

TalkingBadge is a Bluetooth platform for indoor location-based audio messaging, supporting zone-specific information retrieval and one-way text-to-speech paging via smartphones or a TalkingBadge piece of hardware that the user might carry with them. When people walk through a zone covering a few to fifty meters they can listen to short audio messag...

The proliferation of networked forms of communication has captured the attention of media and scholars alike. We have never had quite as many resources for communication as we have today, and such communicative potential has implications for social change. In this article we consider public spheres that emerge through communication in the digital r...

Since the mid-1990s, teenagers have migrated from email and chat rooms to instant messaging (IM). We observed this change in data from 60 interviews with teens and their families conducted from 1996 to 2002 and a national survey of teenagers in 2002. We examined the content of conversations, communication partners, and conversation multitasking. Wh...

One of the central questions animating much social-science research on the social impact of new technology is the specific effect it has on social relationships. This chapter provides a quantitative literature review, a meta-analysis, of 16 empirical studies investigating the association of Internet use with measures of social activity. Collectivel...

Using longitudinal data, this chapter indicates that people who use the Internet most also show the largest decline in television viewing. However, this fall is not steepest among those who use the Internet for entertainment or information seeking, as the functional equivalence argument would imply. Rather, the largest drop in television viewing oc...

Much research has enumerated potential benefits of online social network sites. Given the pervasiveness of these sites and the numbers of people that use them daily, both research and media tend to make the assumption that social network sites have become indispensible to their users.Based on the analysis of qualitative data from users of social ne...

This paper considers how emergency response organizations utilize available social media technologies to communicate with the public in emergencies and to potentially collect valuable information using the public as sources of information on the ground. The authors discuss the use of public social media tools from the emergency management professio...

Social relationships are, arguably, the most valuable assets and investments people accrue in the course of a lifetime. We rely on our relationships for getting through the routines of daily life, yet we often lose touch with many friends and acquaintances over the years. New communication technologies such as social network sites (SNSs) enable peo...

This workshop will consider the implications for conducting research and technology design within and across global and networked sites of technology production and use. In particular, we focus on transnational practices: that is, seeing technology use beyond a single country or culture, but as evolving in relation to global processes, boundary cro...

Technological devices for social networking are produced in droves and networking through media seems to be the way of getting ahead in business. We examine what role technology plays in the creation, development and maintenance of business relationships among entrepreneurs in Copenhagen. We find that mediated communication is useful in all stages...

The space of the Internet is often described as easy to traverse with no regard for national borders. Yet few have considered what such easy border crossings on the Internet might mean to the ordinary people actually doing the traversing. Our qualitative study of regular Internet users in Kazakhstan shows that the naming of a state-controlled space...

This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the role of ubiquitous computing, the use of information and communication technologies and the politics of technological design in transnational practices. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to investigate the implications for the design and development of ubiqu...

Disasters are threatening and highly dynamic situations, marked by high levels of information need and low levels of information availability. Advances in communication technologies have given people more ways to seek information and communicate—a redundancy that can help people cope with disaster situations and support subsequent recovery. This ar...

In this paper we consider how emergency response organizations utilize available social media technologies to communicate with the public in emergencies and to potentially collect valuable information using the public as sources of information on the ground. We discuss the use of public social media tools from the emergency management professionals...

Many observers have praised new communication technologies for providing convenient and affordable tools for maintaining relationships at a distance. Yet the precise role of mediated communication in relationship maintenance has been difficult to isolate. In this paper, we treat residential moves as natural experiments that threaten existing social...

Opportunities for participation by members of the public are expanding the information arena of disaster. Social media supports "backchannel" communications, allowing for wide-scale interaction that can be collectively resourceful, self-policing, and generative of information that is otherwise hard to obtain. Results from our study of information p...

Disasters affect not only the welfare of individuals and family groups, but also the well-being of communities, and can serve as a catalyst for innovative uses of information and communication technology (ICT). In this paper, we present evidence of ICT use for re-orientation toward the community and for the production of public goods in the form of...

As computing moves from the personal desktop into the world around us, the problems of design and usability go beyond technical considerations to contend with preexisting social structure and cultural norms associated with public spaces.

This paper examines how routine uses of the Internet for communication with family and friends and for entertain- ment may serve as indicators of overall levels of psycho- logical well-being. At the same time, changes in psycho- logical well-being in response to a major life event, such as a residential move, can drive changes in routine uses of th...

This research uses the disruption associated with residential mobility, to develop a deeper theoretical understanding of the role of communication technology in the initiation, maintenances and dissolution of social relationships. Residential mobility is a common yet stressful event. It represents a natural experiment, because it puts people in a s...

ABSTRACT What consequences does the widespread adoption of the Internet have, bothfor how Americans spend their time and on their overall psychological well-being? The Internet is used for a wide variety of purposes: communicating,with friends and family,meeting new people, acquiring information about news, health, and other topics, entertainment,...

Abstract The Internet is first and foremost a communication technology, with the potential to change peoples’ social interaction. This paper reviews 16 surveys that examine how Internet use can affect social interaction. Our meta-analysis shows that people’s Internet use is not associated with their social interaction with family members. The evide...

The roots of MySpace.com are deeply entwined with music culture. By explicitly engaging musicians in the design process, MySpace has allowed musicians to create a digital identity and connect with fellow musicians and fans. This paper explores how MySpace designed for bands, the supportive community that musicians were able to create for themselves...

This two-day workshop will advance discussion on the role of public interfaces in engaging citizens within the urban context. The aim is to determine how technology can help to develop cities that address the needs and reflect the desires of its inhabitants. The challenge for the HCI community is to design more effective public interfaces that prov...

One of the outcomes of massive adoption of technology is that much of daily technology use and consumption is embedded into "unremarkable" daily life routines. Occasionally, these routines undergo major shifts, often in conjunction with major life events such as marriage, birth of a child, or a residential move. We propose a model of settling into...

The Internet opens new options for communication and may change the extent to which people use older communication media. Changes in the way people communicate are important, because communication is the mechanism people use to develop and maintain social relationships, so valuable for their physical and mental health. This paper uses data from a n...

This demonstration reports results from the EU-funded project Ambient Agoras, investigating future applications of ubiquitous and ambient computing in workspaces. Instead of presenting underlying system technologies or evaluation findings, this demonstration ...

In this paper we examine how routine uses of the Internet for particular purposes may serve as indicators of overall levels of psychological well-being. Although particular patterns of Internet use seem to mitigate the level of stress response to a major life event, such as a residential move, this effect is marginal. However, changes in psychologi...