Kevin Hamilton

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · School of Art and Design

Content moderation systems for social media have had numerous issues of bias, in terms of race, gender, and ability among many others. One proposal for addressing such issues in automated decision making is by designing for contestability, whereby users can shape and influence how decisions are made. In this study, we conduct a series of participat...

Algorithmic prioritization is a growing focus for social media users. Control settings are one way for users to adjust the prioritization of their news feeds, but they prioritize feed content in a way that can be difficult to judge objectively. In this work, we study how users engage with difficult-to-validate controls. Via two paired studies using...

Awareness of bias in algorithms is growing among scholars and users of algorithmic systems. But what can we observe about how users discover and behave around such biases? We used a cross-platform audit technique that analyzed online ratings of 803 hotels across three hotel rating platforms and found that one site’s algorithmic rating system biased...

Awareness of bias in algorithms is growing among scholars and users of algorithmic systems. But what can we observe about how users discover and behave around such biases? We used a cross-platform audit technique that analyzed on-line ratings of 803 hotels across three hotel rating platforms and found that one site's algorithmic rating system biase...

Many online platforms use curation algorithms that are opaque to the user. Recent work suggests that discovering a filtering algorithm's existence in a curated feed influences user experience, but it remains unclear how users reason about the operation of these algorithms. In this qualitative laboratory study, researchers interviewed a diverse, non...

Narrative film played a vital role in the official political culture of Cold War science and technology, beginning with the spectacular big science venture, the nuclear weapons program. The Special Film Projects narrated particular nuclear events or concepts, providing scripted and often scored documentary overviews of new techniques and technologi...

This article considers the pre-history and history of EG&G, Inc., a key contractor in America's nuclear weapons programme in the Cold War. EG&G was co-founded by M.I.T.’s Harold Edgerton, Kenneth J. Germeshausen, and Herbert E. Grier after World War II in order to serve the nuclear weapons timing and firing needs of the U.S. Department of Defense a...

In 1953 a Hollywood-based U.S. Air Force film studio, Lookout Mountain Laboratory, produced a documentary film about America’s first detonation of a thermonuclear device, the 1952 “MIKE” device. The film, called Operation Ivy, was initially shown only to the highest-level government officials, but a later, edited version was eventually released for...

Computer algorithms organize and select information across a wide range of applications and industries, from search results to social media. Abuses of power by Internet platforms have led to calls for algorithm transparency and regulation. Algorithms have a particularly problematic history of processing information about race. Yet some analysts hav...

The " Slow Movement, " originally associated with conservation efforts in food consumption or city planning, has rapidly spread to many other areas of culture and commerce. This paper anticipates future articulations of " slow art " in general and " slow media art " in particular, as a path to new critiques and perspectives on the modern desire to...

This article considers two visual cultures of America’s deterrent state in the Cold War, the cinematic and cybernetic, by following the history of the 600th Photographic Squadron of the United States (US) Air Force in Vietnam and its 1950s progenitor, the 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron, or Lookout Mountain Laboratory. We argue that cinematic and cy...

Our daily digital life is full of algorithmically selected content such as social media feeds, recommendations and personal-ized search results. These algorithms have great power to shape users' experiences, yet users are often unaware of their presence. Whether it is useful to give users insight into these algorithms' existence or functionality an...

Social media feeds, personalized search results and recommendations are examples of algorithmically curated content in our daily digital Life. While the algorithms that curated this content have great power to shape users' experiences, they are mostly hidden behind the interface, leaving users unaware of their presence. Whether it is helpful to giv...

Design for civic participation in the "smart" city requires examination of the algorithms by which computational processes organize and present geospatial information to inhabitants. How does awareness of these algorithms positively or negatively affect use? A renewed approach to one popular twentieth-century model for city design reveals potential...

The rise in prevalence of algorithmically curated feeds in online news and social media sites raises a new question for designers, critics, and scholars of media: how aware are users of the role of algorithms and filters in their news sources? This paper situates this problem within the history of design for interaction, with an emphasis on the con...

We address the ACM Code of Ethics and discuss the stipulation that researchers follow terms of service. While the reasons for following terms of service are clear, we argue that there are hidden costs. Using the example of research into algorithm awareness and algorithm transparency, we argue that for some research problems the benefits to society...

The "Slow Movement," originally associated with conservation efforts in food consumption or city planning, has rapidly spread to many other areas of culture and commerce. A few art exhibitions and events have even begun to foreground art's history of counter-modern critique through appeals to locality, or withdrawal from modern rhythms of communica...

This essay examines an important icon of American nuclear modernity, the operator at the interface control panel, to show how the logic of nuclear legitimation in the Cold War has perdured into the contemporary world, and that nuclear terrorists and bomb-wielding “rogue states” can function as inventions that rationalize America's claim to nuclear...

In America, visual imagery related to the " Atomic Age " stands ready for recall as a style, easily appropriated into retro-fashion and nostalgia. But Americans with access to the Atomic Age as style don't necessarily stand ready to recall the era's inaugural event—that of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus, within Atomic Age aesthetics,...

Prior knowledge is a critical resource for design, especially when designers are striving to generate new ideas for complex problems. Systems that improve access to relevant prior knowledge and promote reuse can improve design efficiency and outcomes. Unfortunately, such systems have not been widely adopted indicating that user needs in this area h...

Successful collaborations between New Media Arts and HCI tend to develop hybrid techniques that promote balanced contributions from both disciplines. However, since many of these collaborations are one-off or highly dependent on the researchers/artists involved, systematic discussions of the role and impact of the various evaluation techniques and...

Creativity support tools are set an especially difficult task when they are applied to art/science collaboration. Not because of any fundamental incompatibility between the disciplines, but because creativity support tools are rarely supple enough to manage dramatically shifting requirements at various stages of design or handle the diversity of ar...