Paola Tubaro

• BSc MSc PhD SFHEA HDR
• Research Professor ("Directrice de recherche") at French National Centre for Scientific Research

The current hype around artificial intelligence (AI) conceals the substantial human intervention underlying its development. This article lifts the veil on the precarious and low-paid 'data workers' who prepare data to train, test, check, and otherwise support models in the shadow of globalized AI production. We use original questionnaire and inter...

Labor plays a major, albeit largely unrecognized role in the development of artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms are predicated on data-intensive processes that rely on humans to execute repetitive and difficult-to-automate, but no less essential, tasks such as labeling images, sorting items in lists, recording voice samples, and tr...

While much has been written about the problem of information overload in news and social media, little attention has been paid to its consequence in science. Scientific literature, however, has witnessed decades of exponential growth, to the point that the publications of the last twenty years now constitute 60% of all academic literature. This inf...

AI generates both enthusiasm and disillusionment, with promises that often go unfulfilled. It is therefore not surprising that human labor, which is its fundamental component, is also subject to these same deceptions. The development of "smart technologies" depends, at different stages, on a multitude of precarious, underpaid and invisible workers,...

A IA gera tanto entusiasmo quanto desilusão, com promessas que muitas vezes não são cumpridas. Por isso, não é de surpreender que o trabalho humano, que constitui seu componente fundamental, também esteja sujeito a essas mesmas decepções. Na prática, para os trabalhadores, as promessas de desenvolvimento econômico e social, engendradas na origem da...

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) shows a spectacular ability of insertion inside a variety of disciplines which use it for scientific advancements and which sometimes improve it for their conceptual and methodological needs. According to the transverse science framework originally conceived by Shinn and Joerges, AI can be seen as an in...

Recently the set of knowledge referred to as “artificial intelligence” (AI), have become a mainstay of scientific research. AI techniques have not only greatly developed within their native areas of development but have also spread in terms of their application to multiple areas of science and technology. We conduct a large–scale analysis of AI in...

The report lifts the curtain on the Brazilian data workers involved in global AI production chains. They do 'micro-tasks' to generate and annotate data for machine learning, while also checking algorithmic outputs and occasionally, taking the place of failing automation. They use international digital labor platforms through which they execute on-d...

O relatório abarca brasileiros envolvidos nas cadeias globais de produção de IA. Tratam-se de pessoas que realizam 'microtarefas' para gerar e anotar dados para aprendizado de máquina, ao mesmo tempo em que verificam saídas algorítmicas e, ocasionalmente, assumem o lugar de falhas na automação. São utilizadas plataformas internacionais de trabalho...

Scientific research is growingly increasingly reliant on "microwork" or "crowdsourcing" provided by digital platforms to collect new data. Digital platforms connect clients and workers, charging a fee for an algorithmically managed workflow based on Terms of Service agreements. Although these platforms offer a way to make a living or complement oth...

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a large amount of experimental and observational studies reporting clear correlation between the risk of developing severe COVID-19 (or dying from it) and whether the individual is male or female. This paper is an attempt to explain the supposed male vulnerability to COVID-19 using a causal approach. We proceed by...

In recent decades the set of knowledge, tools and practices, collectively referred to as "artificial intelligence" (AI), have become a mainstay of scientific research. Artificial intelligence techniques have not only developed enormously within their native areas of development (computer science, mathematics and statistics) but have also spread fas...

Today's artificial intelligence, largely based on data-intensive machine learning algorithms, relies heavily on the digital labour of invisibilized and precarized humans-in-the-loop who perform multiple functions of data preparation, verification of results, and even impersonation when algorithms fail. Using original quantitative and qualitative da...

Understanding the embedded and disembedded, material and immaterial, territorialized and deterritorialized natures of digital work. Many jobs today can be done from anywhere. Digital technology and widespread internet connectivity allow almost anyone, anywhere, to connect to anyone else to communicate and exchange files, data, video, and audio. In...

Around the world, myriad workers perform micro-tasks on online platforms to train and calibrate artificial intelligence solutions. Despite its apparent openness to anyone with basic skills, this form of crowd-work fails to fill gender gaps, and may even exacerbate them. We demonstrate this result in three steps. First, inequalities in both the prof...

Les métiers de prestation intellectuelle sont particulièrement sensibles aux effets des « plateformes » et des nouveaux intermédiaires numériques du travail B2B. Pourtant, peu de chercheurs ont mis en relation le fonctionnement de ces intermédiaires avec leurs modèles d’affaires. Notre recherche proposera d’affiner les typologies existantes et une...

In this paper, we analyze the recessionary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital platform workers. The crisis has been described as a great work-from-home experiment, with platform ecosystems positing as its most advanced form. Our analysis differentiates the direct (health) and indirect (economic) risks incurred by workers, to critically ass...

This report presents the first results of a new survey of French and German companies on their use of online platform labour. In collaboration with ZEW (Mannheim) and BPI (Paris), we surveyed companies in information and manufacturing industries in Germany and companies in manufacturing, construction, services and trade in France. We look at the ex...

Bridging the social networks, field methods and ethics literatures, I make the case that the process of reporting research findings is an ethical issue, and recommend elevating it in the research design. I draw on a reflective account of three research experiences with settings in, respectively, online health communities, economic organizations, an...

Research in social network analysis (SNA) faces unprecedented ethical challenges today due to both technological developments (‘big’ data) and a growing tendency toward institutionalization of ethics governance. We argue that a suitable response requires a more comprehensive approach to SNA ethics, and we identify two main paths toward this goal. F...

Research on social networks raises formidable ethical issues that often fall outside existing regulations and guidelines. Even standard informed consent and anonymization are difficult to implement with data about personal relationships. Today, state-of-the-art tools to collect, handle, and store personal data expose both researchers and participan...

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a large amount of observational studies reporting linkages between the risk of developing severe COVID-19 or dying from it, and sex and gender. By reviewing a large body of related literature and conducting a fine grained analysis based on sex-disaggregated data of 61 countries spanning 5 continents, we discover se...

This article extends the economic-sociological concept of embeddedness to encompass not only social networks of, for example, friendship or kinship ties, but also economic networks of ownership and control relationships. Applying these ideas to the case of digital platform labour pinpoints two possible scenarios. When platforms take the role of mar...

Marking the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide,” we continue our metaphor of the digital inequality stack by mapping out the rapidly evolving nature of digital inequality using a broad lens. We tackle complex, and often unseen, inequalities spawned by the platform economy, automation, big data, algorithms, cybercrime, cybersafety, gaming, emot...

2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide.” Although a quarter century has passed, legacy digital inequalities continue, and emergent digital inequalities are proliferating. Many of the initial schisms identified in 1995 are still relevant today. Twenty-five years later, foundational access inequalities continue to separate the digital...

Article de divulgation dans une revue syndicale

In this article, we argue that new kinds of risk are emerging with the COVID-19 virus, and that these risks are unequally distributed. As we expose to view, digital inequalities and social inequalities are rendering certain subgroups significantly more vulnerable to exposure to COVID-19. Vulnerable populations bearing disproportionate risks include...

This paper sheds light on the role of digital platform labour in the development of today’s artificial intelligence, predicated on data-intensive machine learning algorithms. Focus is on the specific ways in which outsourcing of data tasks to myriad ‘micro-workers’, recruited and managed through specialized platforms, powers virtual assistants, sel...

Article dans une revue de vulgarisation, redigé en anglais et traduit ensuite en plusieurs langues.

Los servicios de micro-trabajo en internet asignan tareas pequeñas y estandarizadas de generación y anotación de datos a multitud de proveedores. Los resultados se utilizan principalmente para producir soluciones de inteligencia artificial. Es un ejemplo de la “plataformización” de la economía y de las transformaciones del trabajo que provocan las...

‘Micro-work’ consists of fragmented data tasks that myriad providers execute on online platforms. While crucial to the development of data-based technologies, this poorly visible and geographically spread activity is particularly difficult to measure. To fill this gap, we combined qualitative and quantitative methods (online surveys, in-depth inter...

This paper delves into the human factors in the “back-office” of artificial intelligence and of its data-intensive algorithmic underpinnings. We show that the production of AI is a labor-intensive process, which particularly needs the little-qualified, inconspicuous and low-paid contribution of “micro-workers” who annotate, tag, label, correct and...

Les plateformes de micro-travail allouent des tâches fragmentées à des foules de prestataires dont la rémunération peut être aussi faible que quelques centimes. Indispensables pour développer les intelligences artificielles actuelles, ces micro-tâches poussent à l’extrême les logiques de précarité déjà constatées à l’égard des travailleurs « uberis...

Microwork platforms allocate fragmented tasks to crowds of providers with remunerations as low as few cents. Instrumental to the development of today's artificial intelligence, these micro-tasks push to the extreme the logic of casualization already observed in "uberized" workers. The present article uses the results of the DiPLab study to estimate...

How do participants to an event engage with others? This paper examines the emergent relational structure at a “sharing economy” festival, the 2016 OuiShare Fest. A multi-level network analysis design explores the linkages between participation patterns of the “elite” (speakers) and other participants, to unveil the social processes through which s...

How do participants to an event engage with others ? This paper examines the emergent relational structure at a "sharing economy" festival, the 2016 OuiShare Fest. A multi-level network analysis design explores the linkages between participation patterns of the "elite" (speakers) and other participants, to unveil the social processes through which...

Ce texte est une introduction au numéro spécial de la Revue Française de Sociologie sur "Big data, sociétés et sciences sociales", coordonné par Gilles Bastin et Paola Tubaro. Faisant le point sur le moment big data des sciences sociales, les auteurs s’interrogent sur les effets des deux grandes révolutions qui se déroulent dans le domaine des donn...

Private life: A common good? Digital technology and platform business models have transformed privacy. The old notion of privacy as penetration into a person’s intimate space has given way to privacy “as negotiation”: contextual, evolving, and depending on each person’s social environment. This negotiation must be collective and associate the right...

La dimension « publique » de la recherche sociologique peut être vue comme une forme de restitution au sens large, s’inscrivant au carrefour d’enjeux scientifiques, politiques et éthiques, avec des engagements pluriels envers une multiplicité d’acteurs. L’article engage une réflexion à partir d’une situation d’enquête concrète, portant sur les comm...

We introduce a new approach to functional causal modeling from observational data. The approach, called Causal Generative Neural Networks (CGNN), leverages the power of neural networks to learn a generative model of the joint distribution of the observed variables, by minimizing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy between generated and observed data. An a...

Body image issues associated with eating disorders involve attitudinal and perceptual components: individuals’ dissatisfaction with body shape or weight, and inability to assess body size correctly. While prior research has mainly explored social pressures produced by the media, fashion, and advertising industries, this paper focuses on the effects...

Pre-print téléchargeable gratuitement: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01404890/document Consultés et administrés par des personnes atteintes d’anorexie ou d’autres troubles alimentaires, les sites web dits « pro-ana » sont accusés d’inciter à la maigreur extrême. Depuis le début des années 2000, des vagues de polémiques amplifiées par les mé...

Résumé L'article étudie les origines de la relation entre prix et quantité produite. Les travaux de trois auteurs allemands (Hermann, Rau, et Mangoldt) montrent que cette idée résulte de la réinterprétation, à l'aide d'outils algébriques et géométriques, de thèses initialement formulées par les économistes classiques dans un cadre théorique différe...

The paper investigates the place of visual tools in mixed-methods research on social networks, arguing that they can not only improve the communicability of results, but also support research at the data gathering and analysis stages. Three examples from the authors' own research experience illustrate how sociograms can be integrated in multiple wa...

Organizations join interorganizational networks in the hope of gaining exposure to learning opportunities, and accessing valuable extramural resources and knowledge. In this paper we argue that participation in interorganizational networks also reduces performance differentials among organizational nodes. We examine three alternative mechanisms cap...

This article provides a brief overview of the history of microeconomics, starting from the late eighteenth century when its key foundations were laid. Without intending to be comprehensive, the article outlines landmarks and milestones in the building of the basic principles of today's knowledge, highlighting challenges faced and open questions. Fo...

This article presents an agent-based model of a health-related Internet forum. If recent literature demonstrates the relevance of network approaches to gain insight into consensus-building within online groups of peers, the dynamic process of mutual adjustment of participants’ health orientations has been seldom explored. Our model is informed by q...

The era of social media and more generally, the growth of ‘big data’, have led some to hypothesize that our societies are heading towards what can be called the `end-of-privacy’ as we used to know it. Socialization through online networking services generates data as part of the broader process through which a growing range of people’s daily transa...

Overall, our results indicate that the alleged erosion of privacy is far from being a linear process. Privacy itself is not just an attitude or a degree of sensitivity to exposure to the view of others; and cannot be studied only as the resultant of exogenously given individual attributes such as gender, age or education. Rather, the meaning of pri...

As discussed earlier, social media companies’ business model is based on their capacity to monetize the wealth of personal data to which they have access. Often, users have no monetary price to pay to use the service, but still have to arbitrate between the opportunities offered by social networking services and the possible ‘costs’ (in terms of pe...

The current transformations bring with them a wealth of potential informational gains from more intense use of detailed personal data, but also numerous uncertainties. Key areas where data on individuals are crucial to corporate success—and privacy concerns are bound to emerge—are the relationships of an organization with its stakeholders: in parti...

The preceding discussions point to the need to focus attention on users. To do so, we use an agent-based computer simulation, as an extension of the theoretical analysis developed in the preceding sections. In this chapter, we outline its basic structure and functioning, the experiments that have been run, and their results.

The observed increase in the amount of personal information that is publicly visible online depends partly on users’ behaviors, partly on the active policies of Internet companies, partly on regulators’ interventions. A historical perspective is now in order to pinpoint the elements of novelty in today’s situation, to characterize more precisely th...

This article presents an agent-based model of a health-related Internet forum. If recent literature demonstrates the relevance of network approaches to gain insight into consensus-building within online groups of peers, the dynamic process of mutual adjustment of participants' health orientations has been seldom explored. Our model is informed by q...

This paper builds a theoretical framework to detect the conditions under which social influence enables persistence of a shared opinion among members of an organization over time, despite membership turnover. It develops agent-based simulations of opinion evolution in an advice network, whereby opinion is defined in the broad sense of shared unders...

We study how people select their health support ties from their broader personal networks, taking into account the interplay of web-based and face-to-face interactions. We focus on users of self-styled Internet communities on eating disorders, often dubbed “pro-ana” and “pro-mia” and widely feared to contribute to maintaining and spreading these di...

The article presents a method to elicit personal network data in Internet surveys, exploiting the renowned appeal of network visualizations to reduce respondent burden and risk of dropout. It is a participant-generated computer-based sociogram, an interactive graphical interface enabling participants to draw their own personal networks with simple...

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen edited the English translation of Hermann Heinrich Gossen’s 1854 book The Laws of Human Relations and wrote a lengthy introduction to it. His highly appreciative, thoroughly documented study has become a major reference on an otherwise little-known early writer. It suggests that Gossen was unjustly ignored by his contempor...

Several prominent public voices have advanced the hypothesis that networked communications erode the value of privacy in favor of a transparent connected existence. Especially younger generations are often described as prone to live "open digital lives". This hypothesis has raised considerable controversy, polarizing the reaction of its critics as...

We can now reflect on the insight derived from our study, its limitations, and possible directions for future research. We have relied on a computer simulation model informed by social theory, previous literature and secondary sources, but we have used no raw, let alone original, empirical data: our effort remains essentially theoretical.

Review essay on the following books:Christina Prell, Social Network Analysis: History, Theory and Methodology, London: SAGE, 2011, £26.99 pbk (ISBN: 9781412947152), 272 pp.Thomas W Valente, Social Networks and Health: Models, Methods and Applications, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, £32.99 hbk (ISBN: 9780195301014), 292 pp.Matthew O Jackson,...

Several prominent public voices have advanced the hypothesis that networked communications erode the value of privacy in favor of a transparent connected existence. Especially younger generations are often described as prone to live "open digital lives". This hypothesis has raised considerable controversy, polarizing the reaction of its critics as...

Dr AA Casilli from Telecom ParisTech, Dr F Pailler from the Edgar Morin Centre and Dr P Tubaro from Greenwich University demonstrate how the reshaping and censoring of online ana-mia communities is bad news for health care providers and policy makers

This paper studies the 'wholesale' market through which microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Peru, Tanzania and the state of Tamil Nadu in India obtain loans from a variety of domestic and international funding bodies. The focus is on the extent to which patterns in wholesale lending relationships relate to the legal status and characteristics of MF...

Following the 2011 wave of political unrest, extending from the Arab Spring to the UK riots, the formation of a large consensus around Internet censorship is underway. The present paper adopts a social simulation approach to show that the decision to “regulate”, filter or censor social media in situations of unrest changes the pattern of civil prot...

The paper studies the 'wholesale' market through which microfinance institutions operating in three contexts (Peru, Tanzania and the state of Tamil Nadu in India) obtain loans from a variety of domestic and international funding bodies. The nature and characteristics of the relationships between them are captured through network analysis and visual...

The issue of the influence of norms on behavior is as old as sociology itself. This paper explores the effect of normative homophily (i.e. “sharing the same normative choices”) on the evolution of the advice network among lay judges in a courthouse. (Blau, 1955) and (Blau, 1964) social exchange theory suggests that members select advisors based on...

Resume This paper offers a methodical review of the scientific literature of the last decade that concerns itself with online services offering supportive advocacy for anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa (‘pro-ana’ and ‘pro-mia’). The main question is whether these studies reproduce the traditional divide in the study of eating disorders, between...

Access to Official Data and Researcher Accreditation in Europe: Existing Barriers and a Way Forward

The paper studies the 'wholesale' market through which microfinance institutions (MFIs) operating in Peru, Tanzania, and the state of Tamil Nadu in India obtain credit. The focus is on the network of relationships between MFIs and their lenders in each setting in order to explore the extent to which they mirror country-specific regulatory, economic...

Following the 2011 wave of political unrest, going from the Arab Spring to UK riots, the formation of a large consensus around Internet censorship is underway. Beyond all political consideration of consequences in terms of freedom of expression, the present paper adopts a social simulation approach to show that the decision to "regulate" or restric...

Businesses are usually very keen to participate in the governance of their markets (Lazega and Mounier, 2002, 2003; Falconi et al., 2005). In this chapter, we combine a sociological perspective on joint governance of markets with an economic perspective, such as that of Dixit (2009) that deals with issues of social optimality of private or public g...

In discussing rational choice theory (RCT) as an explanation of demand behavior, Becker (1962, Journal of Political Economy, 70, 1-13) proposed a model of random choice in which consumers pick a bundle on their budget line according to a uniform distribution. This model has then been used in various ways to assess the validity of RCT and to support...

This paper forms part of a selection of papers from the 4th & 5th UK Social Networks Conferences held at The University of Greenwich in London, UK, July 2008 and 2009 - published as Vol.10 of the journal Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences in 2011.