Alan F. Blackwell’s research while affiliated with University of Cambridge and other places

... In the face of this we might deceive users and give them fake 'explanations' ( [4,46] etc.) which serve a justificatory role to induce 'appropriate reliance' ( [8,9,13,45] etc.). Or we might provide diagnostics so they can build accurate assessments of their own (eg., [7,15,35,69] etc.). Or (my preference) we might try to explain the data generating process and expose the validity conditions on the data itself (say, e.g., [39]) with the aim to demystify. ...

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Deceptive AI dehumanizes: The ethics of misattributed intelligence in the design of Generative AI interfaces

... Blackwell (and others, [2,6,12,21,33]) have noted this disposition to misattribute capacities to machines (largely the literature considers the anthropomorphic case): "A 'self-driving' car does not have an artificial driver, it is simply a slightly more complex cruise-control" [12]. What is the phenomenology of a driver who mistakes the car's capacity for agency? ...

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Deceptive AI dehumanizes: The ethics of misattributed intelligence in the design of Generative AI interfaces

... With respect to artists' books, Ganley (2020) critically engages in the idea of a hierarchy of images, ranked according to the their technologically-enabled resolutions. We can see a similar hierarchy in witness testimony: in the context of limited resources and of iteration prerogatives that, as Blackwell (2022) points out, engage with the concept of profit, witness testimony that is 'cheaper' to verify may better move along the witnessing chain. Witnesses who know how to save institutional witnesses time and effort-if not directly money-by providing verification subsidies (like metadata) stand a better chance of getting iterated (McPherson 2016). ...

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Witnessing: iteration and social change

... The few ethnographies of AI that have been conducted so far tend to focus on either innovation in ethnographic methods and AI (Sumathi et al., 2023), the ethnography of software engineers (Forsythe, 2001;Blackwell, 2021), or the ethnography of AI in the broader materiality and social structures within which it is created (Crawford and Joler, 2018;Crawford, 2021). Anthropologists argue that even if we cannot explain how some of our machine learning models work, we can still illuminate them through anthropological methods (Munk et al., 2022). ...

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AI as a constituted system: accountability lessons from an LLM experiment

... Except for the agricultural, health, telecom, and financial sectors, big data is not readily available in African key socio-economic sectors. Related to the problems of data, Blackwell, Damena, and Tegegne (2022) posit that the absence of a big dataset affects the research outcome of Natural Language Processing (NLP) researchers in Ethiopia. The authors note that NLP researchers in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia create their own datasets, which tend to be small as compared with similar research being done in the English language with big datasets using deep learning methods. ...

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Technical Considerations for Designing, Developing, and Implementing AI Systems in Africa

... The introduction of human-like types of responsiveness into CMCs and VUIs, based on the musicality of our everyday interactions, would straightforwardly breach this rule; it would introduce an asymmetry of deontic commitment (see Kissine 2008) into the interaction. In effect, we would be likely to attribute to an adaptive VUI properties such as autonomy and, perhaps, sociality, that could condition the ways in which we interacted with it (for a preliminary exploration of the effects of embedding rhythm in a human-computer interactive task see Yu et al. 2021). This would be likely to involve ceding a degree of our own autonomy to the system and its creators. ...

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Music in the digital age: commodity, community, communion

... On the other hand, the comprehension of various artefacts has been studied and measured extensively, for example, comprehension of block-based programming versus textbased programming [48], comprehension of DSL programs versus GPL (General-Purpose Language) programs [49][50][51], the influence of visual notation to requirement specification apprehension [52], and comprehension of charts for visually impaired individuals [53]. ...

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The Impact of Code Bloat on Genetic Program Comprehension: Replication of a Controlled Experiment on Semantic Inference

... Innovation in Aging, 2024, Vol. 8, No. 10 Against the backdrop, community-based interventions, paired with the integration of digital technologies, have been seen as promising approaches to promoting active aging. Active aging, defined as "the process of optimizing opportunities for health, participation and security to enhance the quality of life as people age," is crucial for ensuring the well-being and vitality of older adults (Mao et al., 2020;Nassir et al., 2015;Robbins et al., 2018). Although there is a growing acknowledgment that technology can be effectively utilized in community-based interventions to foster active aging, scholars highlight the necessity of appropriately integrating digital technologies into community-based interventions aimed at fostering active aging Karkera et al., 2023). ...

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Navigating Challenges and Opportunities in Community-Based Interventions for Promoting Active Aging: A Systematic Review of the Roles of Technology

... TUI research provides us with a general framework for thinking about all the situations in which objects in the physical world might be augmented, so that they can be used to manipulate or correspond with computational abstractions [7]. TUIs also provide us with a fascinating opportunity to rethink human engagement with physical objects, for example in mediating social interaction or as external cognitive resources. ...

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Tangible user interfaces in context and theory

... How data are produced, generated, aggregated, and applied in organizations thus becomes a core concern for both managers and researchers (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2022, Pachidi et al., 2021. With data having acquired their own signi cance (Jones et al., 2019), their transformational impacts are increasingly relevant to the digital transformation of organizations (Vial, 2019;Wessel et al., 2021) and to society at large (Majchrzak et al., 2016;Riasanow et al., 2019). ...

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Digital Transformation in Health Care: The Role of Professional Practices