Liam Magee

• PhD
• Principal Research Fellow at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

COVID‐19 resulted in global restrictions on migration, with pronounced consequences in Australia, where the resettlement of refugees was significantly curtailed from March 2020. This research, comprising a third phase in an ongoing study on refugee settlement and integration, seeks to understand the broader implications of these restrictions on fam...

For a contemporary philosopher, the question of whether AI will transform relations might imply a hidden metaphysical conceit. If you were to raise perhaps the quite genuine concern that ChatGPT will, token by generated token, dismantle the delicate threads of a social fabric, they might respond that these connections you hold so dear-between frien...

The prevailing paradigm for training models to perform intelligence is mimetic: the copying of human patterns to produce unsurprising or low perplexity samples of language and other media. At its limits the imitative paradigm appears destined to produce theoretical as much as practical contradictions. For example, the very desire to build an AI app...

Neoliberalism has become orthodoxy in the present, erasing competing paradigms and alternative imaginings. Chile's radical Cybersyn project from 1971 to 1973 offers a departure point for an alternative path, albeit one that was abruptly and violently extinguished. We revisit this moment by fine-tuning AI language models on the words and writing of...

While the pandemic highlighted the critical role technology plays in children’s lives, not all Australian children have reliable access to technology. This situation exacerbates educational disadvantage for children who are already amongst the nation’s most vulnerable. In this research, we carried out a project with three schools in Western Austral...

From the deployment of chatbots as procurement negotiators by corporations such as Walmart to autonomous agents providing ‘differentiated chat’ for managing overbooked flights, synthetic media are making the world of logistics their ‘natural’ habitat. Here, the coordination of commodities, parts and labour design the problems and produce the traini...

Large language models (LLMs) produce sequences learned as statistical patterns from large corpora. Their emergent status as representatives of the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to an increased attention to the possibilities of regulating the automated production of linguistic utterances and interactions with human users in a pro...

This paper explores use of multiple large language model (LLM) agents to simulate complex, dynamic characters in dramatic scenarios. We introduce a `drama machine' framework that coordinates interactions between LLM agents playing different `Ego' and `Superego' psychological roles. In roleplay simulations, this design allows intersubjective dialogu...

This chapter experiments with ways computational vision interprets and synthesises representations of the Anthropocene. Text-to-image systems such as MidJourney and StableDiffusion, trained on large data sets of harvested images and captions, yield often striking compositions that serve, alternately, as banal reproduction, alien imaginary and refra...

Built heritage has been both subject and product of a gaze that has been sustained through moments of colonial fixation on ruins and monuments, technocratic examination and representation, and fetishisation by a global tourist industry. We argue that the recent proliferation of machine learning and vision technologies create new scopic regimes for...

Drawing from the resources of psychoanalysis and critical media studies, in this article we develop an analysis of large language models (LLMs) as ‘automated subjects’. We argue the intentional fictional projection of subjectivity onto LLMs can yield an alternate frame through which artificial intelligence (AI) behaviour, including its productions...

Stories of belonging in this country are incomplete without the stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who have had custodianship of this land for millennia. Each year, thousands of refugees are welcomed to Australia, home to the oldest continuous cultures in the world. Are refugees who settle in Australia aware of this rich and a...

This article makes two key contributions to methodological debates in automation research. First, we argue for and demonstrate how methods in this field must account for intersections of social difference, such as race, class, ethnicity, culture, and disability, in more nuanced ways. Second, we consider the complexities of bringing together computa...

As AI technologies are rolled out into healthcare, academia, human resources, law, and a multitude of other domains, they become de-facto arbiters of truth. But truth is highly contested, with many different definitions and approaches. This article discusses the struggle for truth in AI systems and the general responses to date. It then investigate...

This article focuses on uses and experiences of everyday sensory technologies by racially and ethnically diverse persons with disabilites, bringing our research to the junction of critical technology studies, migration studies, and critical disability studies. We draw on a large-scale qualitative project that involves new and second-generation migr...

Introduction While individuals from marginalised and vulnerable communities have long been confronted with the task of developing coping strategies, COVID-19 lockdowns intensified the conditions under which resilience and wellbeing were/are negotiated, not only for marginalised communities but for people from all walks of life. In particular, the p...

This research incorporated an interface methodology that blended First Nations knowledges and Western research methodologies. This research advocates for a decolonising ethos to inform future institutional and systemic efforts to develop closer ties between First Nations and refugee communities, in order to truly build stronger foundations for belo...

AI image models are rapidly evolving, disrupting aesthetic production in many industries. However, understanding of their underlying archives, their logic of image reproduction, and their persistent biases remains limited. What kind of methods and approaches could open up these black boxes? In this paper, we provide three methodological approaches...

The world is experiencing an accelerating digital transformation. One aspect of this is the implementation of algorithmic decision-making, often supported by Artificial Intelligence. Algorithmic systems have the potential to change the meaning of critical elements of the engagement between social workers and people who need support. At the same tim...

Data sharing partnerships are increasingly an imperative for research institutions and, at the same time, a challenge for established models of data governance and ethical research oversight. We analyse four cases of data partnership involving academic institutions and examine the role afforded to the research partner in negotiating the relationshi...

As AI technologies are rolled out into healthcare, academia, human resources, law, and a multitude of other domains, they become de-facto arbiters of truth. But truth is highly contested, with many different definitions and approaches. This article discusses the struggle for truth in AI systems and the general responses to date. It then investigate...

Drawing from the resources of psychoanalysis and critical media studies, in this paper we develop an analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs) as automated subjects. We argue the intentional fictional projection of subjectivity onto LLMs can yield an alternate frame through which AI behaviour, including its productions of bias and harm, can be analy...

This article makes two key contributions to methodological debates in automation research. First, we argue for and demonstrate how methods in this field must account for intersections of social difference, such as race, class, ethnicity, culture, and disability, in more nuanced ways. Second, we consider the complexities of bringing together computa...

Public libraries occupy a highly visible and promissory role for how individuals and communities learn, interact and share with one another. Yet libraries are increasingly underfunded, decried as outdated or irrelevant, or swept up in neoliberal agendas and financialised logics. Combined, these threaten the public library as an indispensable site f...

To examine whether intersectional bias can be observed in language generation, we examine \emph{GPT-2} and \emph{GPT-NEO} models, ranging in size from 124 million to ~2.7 billion parameters. We conduct an experiment combining up to three social categories - gender, religion and disability - into unconditional or zero-shot prompts used to generate s...

The cities of Cape Town, Christchurch, Hobart, Punta Arenas, and Ushuaia are formally recognized international gateway cities through which flows most travel to the Antarctic region. All significant engagement with the South Polar region is co-ordinated through them. By geographical placement and historical contingency, these cities have a special...

Artists and creative workers have long been recognized as playing an important role in gentrification, being often portrayed as forerunners of urban change and displacement in former industrial and working-class suburbs of 'post-Fordist' cities. However, as is well represented by recent research, the relationship between the arts, gentrification an...

This article draws upon content analysis of Australian parliamentary transcripts to examine debates about asylum seekers who arrived by boat in three historical periods: 1977–1979, 1999–2001, and 2011–2013. We analyze term frequency and co-occurrence to identify patterns in specific usage of the phrase “boat people.” We then identify how the term i...

Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outcome and a subject of academic research. In this article, we detail the results of workshops with young residents of five “Antarctic gateway cities” (Hobart, Christchurch, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, and Cape Town) who helped design and evaluate an online gam...

Recent literature on Antarctic futures includes sobering scenarios for the Southern Polar region in the era of Anthropogenic climate change. Contrasting current trajectories with what might be accomplished through appropriate policies and stewardship, such studies acknowledge that change involves more than exhortation through scholarly venues of co...

Antarctica Day celebrates the icy continent and its unique governance system. It’s the anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty’s adoption on December 1 1959. Framed in a spirit of global co-operation, the treaty acknowledges Antarctica does not belong to any one country. Article IV states: No acts or activities taking place while the present Treaty is...

This article presents and analyses population data on the Liverpool area of Greater Western Sydney, identifying trends with significant policy implications. Liverpool city is home to one of the highest concentrations of Australia's recent arrivals, many of whom have refugee backgrounds. From those who arrived under Australia's post‐Second World War...

Personal data is highly vulnerable to security exploits, spurring moves to lock it down through encryption, to cryptographically ‘cloud’ it. But personal data is also highly valuable to corporations and states, triggering moves to unlock its insights by relocating it in the cloud. We characterise this twinned condition as ‘clouded data’. Clouded da...

Children's Rights and Sustainable Development - edited by Claire Fenton-Glynn April 2019

From consumer hard drives and enterprise servers, data is migrating to the cloud. Driven by lower costs of ownership, elastic on-demand services, improved interoperability and the insights produced through machine learning, cloud-based computing synthesises the best of previous mainframe and personal computing paradigms. However the cloud—and the v...

This report was commissioned to assist the Inner West Council in developing a greater understanding of the nature and extent of future needs for creative space in the local government area (LGA), with a focus on infrastructure for cultural creation and production. The research focuses on the relationships between artists, creators, their activities...

Measuring the dynamic shape of digital practices and their near-ubiquitous relationship to daily life is an elusive quest, one that must contend with temporal and relational limits. Research instruments employing categories and indicators struggle with the transient and interconnected character of the digital ‘social fact’. Longitudinal studies pos...

Lack of access to services is one of the chief difficulties faced by marginalized urban communities. The proximity of digital technologies and data promises to remove a key constraint to greater access: the unequal distribution of information. However, issues of digital literacy and affordability and the local specificity of services make opportuni...

This research was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing an up-to-date, wide-ranging understanding of its future needs for creative space, especially with regard to cultural creation and production. Most studies of creative space tend to focus on the material aspects of cultural venues and infrastructure, such as capacity, design o...

In this article we explore various constraints and potentials of academic publishing in the digital age. Advancement of digital platforms and their expansive reach amplify the underlying tensions of institutional and scholarly change. A key affordance of these platforms is that of speed: rapidly distributing the outputs of a precaritised profession...

Creative activity and cultural facilities are routinely touted as markers and facilitators of successful cities and societies. This view is underpinned by the assumption that they contribute to local economic growth, foster a positive city image, and enhance urban quality of life. Creativity and the consumption of art are also well established as m...

Kolorob is a participatory platform connecting informal settlement communities with services and informal jobs in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Alongside technological systems, expertise from community, non-government, private-sector, volunteer and academic fields has been integral to the platform’s development. These socio-technical connections and networks,...

Sustainability indicators are increasingly being used to measure the economic, environmental and social properties of complex systems across different temporal and spatial scales. This motivates their inclusion in open distributed knowledge systems such as the Semantic Web. The diversity of such indicator sets provides considerable choice but also...

This paper explores current debates, data products and key implications of what has been called the urban data revolution, which has emerged to international prominence in recent years. We engage with critical appraisals of the new urban data revolution, and discuss what they can learn from both the successes and the failures of the earlier wave of...

Extreme weather events in Australia are common and a large proportion of the population are exposed to such events. Therefore, there is great interest as to how these events impact Australia's society and economy, which requires understanding the current and historical impact of disasters. Despite global efforts to record and cost disaster impacts,...

The field of disaster loss assessment attempts to provide comprehensive estimates of the cost of disasters. Assessment of intangibles remains a major weakness. Existing costing frameworks have acknowledged losses to cultural – as distinct from economic, social, human or environmental – capital. However, the inclusion of cultural line items has usua...

The Conclusion recapitulates briefly the book’s argumentative trajectory and concludes with an exhortation to consider possibilities for repatterning and reweaving the global urban fabric, as is described in the text.

Drawing upon the more literal connotations of fabric, Chapter 5 is concerned with the sensory, affective and craftlike aspects of cities. Reviewing Bahktin’s formulation of the ‘carnivalesque’, it ventures into a series of different urban aesthetic ‘modes’, intentionally fragmentary and kaleidoscopic, to draw out some of the many ways cities are se...

Chapter 4 considers how, contiguous with the rise of automated machines, systems, networks, algorithms and circuits, technology is weaving new fabrics into and between cities. It then discusses ways in which computational models increasingly suggest or proscribe contemporary urban formations. Technological methods for appraising and sensing the cit...

Chapter 1 begins with the space and at the level of the city, examining how industrial and modernist developments have served to compile an urban tapestry that is fraught and contested. It then discusses two contradictory movements in contemporary urban development: new urbanist trends that emphasise human-scale development, creativity, participati...

The Introduction outlines the key argument of the text: that an extended conception of the urban fabric can help grasp the complexities of global challenges that unfold at multiple spatial levels. It also summarises the contents of each of the five chapters and explains their contribution to the argument.

This chapter begins with discussions of recent treatments of cities as dispositifs and assemblages and I tease out the implications of these treatments for the more colloquial proxy of fabric. I expand the preferred weaving metaphor into a schematic for articulating how the urban fabric can be analytically understood, stretched across three spatial...

Proposing a renovation of the metaphor of the urban fabric, Interwoven Cities develops an analysis of how cities might be woven into alternative patterns, to better sustain social and ecological life.

This paper presents a software application for sustainability reporting where a multi-agent system is an integral part of the overall architecture. We describe the social science philosophy and approach on which the application is based, and the ways in which an agent-based system is able to support these. In particular, we explore how the pro-acti...

Cities are home to the most consequential current attempts at human adaptation and they provide one possible focus for the flourishing of life on this planet. However, for this to be realized in more than an ad hoc way, a substantial rethinking of current approaches and practices needs to occur. Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice responds...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of the standardisation of two largely overlapping electronic document formats between 2005 and 2008, and its implications for future IT standards development. Design/methodology/approach – The document format controversy is researched as an exemplary case study of the institutional riva...

Purpose – Previous work highlights two key challenges in searching for information about individual entities (such as persons, places and organisations) over semantic data: query ambiguity and redundant attributes. The purpose of this paper is to consider these challenges and proposes the Attribute Importance Model (AIM) for clustering and ranking...

Community-based urban aquaponics enterprises represent a new model for how to blend local agency with scientific innovation to deliver food sovereignty (FS) in cities, re-engaging and giving urban communities more control over their food production and distribution. Little is known, however, about the factors and outcomes that determine the success...

In April 2013, the Ministry of Planning and Sustainable Development, Trinidad and Tobago, invited the United Nations Global Compact, Cities Programme, to review its draft National Spatial Development Strategy. Globe Consultants International Limited developed the draft Strategy in consultation with the Government of Trinidad and Tobago. The Strateg...

Existing approaches to sustainability assessment are typically characterized as being either “top–down” or “bottom–up.” While top–down approaches are commonly adopted by businesses, bottom–up approaches are more often adopted by civil society organizations and communities. Top–down approaches clearly favor standardization and commensurability betwe...

We present an ontology to represent the key concepts of sustainability indicators that are increasingly being used to measure the economic, environmental and social properties of complex systems. There have been few efforts to represent multiple indicators formally, in spite of the fact that comparison of indicators and measurements across reportin...

Efforts to measure social and community sustainability confront a series of methodological dilemmas. We present four key distinctions that tend to orient such efforts: between objective and subjective assessment; between “communities” as the sum-of-their-parts, or as holistic and distinct entities in themselves; between present and future aspects t...

Recent debate on sustainability indicator development has centred upon top-down and bottom-up methods. In practice, a key difficulty is the establishment of defensible issues and indicators to use. Here, we present a structured approach for transitioning from initial community consultation designed to elicit issues to the downstream definition, com...

We have developed a software application for a new, emerging approach to sustainability reporting, where a multi-agent system is an integral part of the overall architecture. The agent-oriented approach readily achieves the functionality required for this application, and the Belief Desire Intention (BDI) agent framework assisted in clarifying syst...

In light of recent interest in theories of green citizenship, citizens' reported values in relation to policy for household sustainability are examined. Theory is combined with an empirical study of citizen attitudes in order to ask how established conceptions of citizenship might obstruct or foster opportunities for the practices that greens advoc...

This paper presents a novel web-based ABM environments, and associated 'serious game' for teaching urban sustainability concepts.

The value of a single dataset is increased when it is linked to combinations of datasets to provide users with more information. Linked Data is a style of publishing data on the Web by using a struc-tured machine-readable format, RDF, and semantically typed relations to connect related data. Its structured representation opens up new possibilities...

This book addresses the question of how knowledge is currently documented, and may soon be documented in the context of what it calls âsemantic publishingâ??. This takes two forms: a more narrowly and technically defined âsemantic webâ as well as a broader notion of semantic publishing. This book examines the ways in which knowledge is represented...

The Semantic Web proposes a framework for establishing a "web of data", analogous to the "web of documents" of the World Wide Web. It envisions a series of interconnected ontologies, underwritten by formal languages such as OWL and RDF. The problem of co-ordinating disparate ontologies has led to the development of various ontology matching approac...

In this paper we present a tool, SOMET, for collaborative developing, matching and merging ontologies. The tool's design is based on a Wiki model, allowing for multiple authors to contribute to an on- tology. It also provides a number of meta-ontology features, including the ability to compare, match and merge. The tool makes use of one algorithmic...