April 2023 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

4-year PhD position in Technology and Social Change at Linköping University
by Julia Velkova 04 Apr '23

04 Apr '23

Dear colleagues, We have currently an opening for a fully funded, 4-year PhD position in Technology and Social Change related to my ProFutura Scientia project "When Communication Networks Come to Die - Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Infrastructural Dismantling". The project explores the politics and experiences that arise when communication networks (such as internet infrastructure, platforms, software, data or other kinds of media infrastructure) age, get dismantled or abandoned, and the cultural, political, historical and societal implications of these processes for different actors. The position is located in Linköping, Sweden at a vibrant, international and interdisciplinary department. Relevant backgrounds for this position include an MA in anthropology, media- and communication studies, STS or related fields. Deadline 2nd of May. Please share! https://liu.se/en/work-at-liu/vacancies/21686<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fliu.se%2Fen%2Fwork-at-liu%2Fva…> All the best, Julia — Julia Velkova, PhD Associate Professor Technology and Social Change | Media and Communication Studies Co-chair DATA LAB<http://juliavelkova.org/data-lab/> Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change Linköping University Tel: +46 13 28 40 25 web: www.juliavelkova.org<http://www.juliavelkova.org>

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Position open for an auditing AI project funded by Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab
by Debarun Sarkar 04 Apr '23

04 Apr '23

Looking for an independent computer engineer/researcher to join a team of interdisciplinary researchers working on an auditing AI project funded by Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab Rank and title: Full stack developer/tech lead/computer scientist/engineer/researcher Discipline: Full stack developer, computer science Mode of work: Part-time/remote/flexible Period: 1st June 2023 – 31st Dec 2023 (7 months) Joining: 1st June 2023 Salary: USD 1,571.4 per month (~INR 1,25,000 per month) (invoiced monthly or quarterly as per preference). There is also a contingency fund for attending international conferences. The work contract will be signed with the University of Notre Dame. We are looking for a full-stack developer to join our team of two independent researchers for a seven-month assignment for the Audit4SG project. The project is funded through a grant by the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab at the University of Notre Dame. Grant and project description link.<https://techethicslab.nd.edu/call-for-proposals/> Job Description The full-stack developer will work in a team with two domain experts and a designer to develop a proof-of-concept web tool which will build off a knowledge graph/ontology that the domain experts will develop. The responsibility of the developer will be to overlook the transition of the ontology into a proof-of-concept web tool that can query the ontology. They will also coordinate with the designer concerning technical matters of design assets. About the Project The project, Audit4SG: Toward an Ontology of AI Auditing for a Web Tool to Generate Customizable AI Auditing Methodologies for AI4SG, is being led by two principal investigators, Cheshta Arora, PhD (ORCID<https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2470-7783>), and Debarun Sarkar (ORCID<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6873-4727>). Both are independent social science researchers based out of Bengaluru, India. The project aims to develop an ontology of auditing AI, which will be used to build an auditing web tool. The target users of the tool are external AI auditors of AI4SG (AI for Social Good), who will be able to generate customizable AI auditing methodologies. Along with the custom AI auditing methodology generated by the user, the tool will provide the user with a report card noting the pros and cons of the chosen AI auditing methodology. The web tool will be a proof of concept whose underlying ontology will contribute to the field of relational ethics in AI auditing that can account for diverse interests, multi-directional processes, multi-scalar networks of actors, institutions, data, algorithms, infrastructure, values, and knowledges. For heuristic purposes and based on the team’s domain expertise, the project will limit itself to three domains of AI4SG: economic empowerment, education, and equality and inclusion. Experience Application is open to both formally trained or self-trained individuals who can demonstrate the required skills and self-driven initiatives. Skills * Familiarity with front and back-end web development: HTML/CSS/Python/JavaScript/SQL etc. * Knowledge of or familiarity with OWL2/RDF and/or SPARQL is an advantage. * Communication skill is essential to be able to converse across disciplines. (Note: We are not asking for English language skills but for someone interested in communicating/exchanging difficult concepts across disciplines). The team can speak and understand Bengali, English, Hindi and Punjabi. * Academic writing skills are preferred but not necessary. We hope to co-author HCI papers with the engineer. * Interest in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) or AI ethics is an advantage. Expectations As independent researchers, we work on our rhythm and routine. We do not believe in micromanaging as a team and believe in demonstrating work through output rather than the hours put in. As a developer, you would be catching up with the team on a weekly or fortnightly meeting depending on the intensity and the nature of the work. The developer should be self-driven, able to manage their work themselves, and meet deadlines as needed. Contact for Application Please send in your CV with a cover letter mentioning any relevant portfolio details or links to previous work, including any academic texts (if any). In the cover letter please mention why you would like to join the project. Address the email to both, Cheshta Arora, cheshtaarora[at]outlook[dot]in (ORCID<https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2470-7783>) and Debarun Sarkar debarun[at]outlook[dot]com (ORCID<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6873-4727>). Use the subject line: ‘Application for Audit4SG’. We will review the applications on a rolling basis till 15th April until we find someone suitable. Please apply at the earliest for a faster response.

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IAMCR Pre-Conference CfP: Climate Mis/Disinformation
by Garcia Sara 04 Apr '23

04 Apr '23

Dear colleagues (apologies for cross-posting), We would like to circulate the CfP for IAMCR's Pre-Conference on *Climate Mis/Disinformation in a Post-Factual Era*. *Call for Papers * Download the Climate Mis/Disinformation in a Post-Factual Era CfP <https://iamcr.org/sites/default/files/final-extended-cfp-disinformation-and…> for more information. Climate change mis/disinformation is fed through well-funded, transnational interest groups, as well as conservative politicians and social media algorithms. These campaigns are currently changing the contours of political communication and blocking effective action. There is a growing body of literature establishing a connection between the global rise of right-wing populism and climate mis/disinformation (Fraune and Knodt, 2018; Gottenhuber and Mulholland, 2019; Hameleers, 2020). Right-wing leaders around the world have joined vested interests and co-opted climate debates as part of their culture wars. Denialist claims go from logical fallacies, fake experts, and conspiracy theories (Cook, Ellerton and Kinkead, 2018) to the fabrication of fake controversies and asking for unrealistic scientific proof (Hansson, 2017). However, in a context of overwhelming scientific evidence about the climate crisis, clear-cut disinformation and denialism are being combined with mere “inactivism” (Mann, 2021), recurring to more sophisticated techniques that send deterring and misleading messages (Forchtner and Lubarda, 2022). Big-tech firms play a role in this cycle, functioning without proper climate misinformation policies and amplifying climate mis/disinformation on social media. This pre-conference welcomes theoretical and methodological papers that explore the intertwining between climate change mis/disinformation, populism, and vested interests in a post-factual world. *Date and time* Saturday, 8 July 2023 | 09h00 – 18h30 *Location* Lyon, France (venue to be confirmed) *Participation and Registration* The pre-conference welcomes original and state-of-the-art contributions that broaden the theoretical and/or empirical understanding of climate change mis/disinformation, populism, and vested interests in a post-factual world as well as a variety of methodological approaches. The conference will have a registration cost of €30. *Keynote Speakers* • Anabela Carvalho, Universidade do Minho (Portugal) • James Painter, Reuters Institute, University of Oxford (UK) *Submission guidelines* - Authors should send a 500-word abstract (excluding references) in English to Sara García Santamaría, sgarciasanta(a)uoc.edu - Abstract submission deadline: *14 April 2023* - All abstracts must include the title, full name, affiliation, and contact information. - Decisions on acceptance will be communicated by *30 April 2023.* *Organisers* - Marie Grusell (Associate Professor in Journalism Media and Communication, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Chair, Political Communication Research Section - IAMCR). - Sara García Santamaría (Postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain; Vice-Chair, Political Communication Research Section - IAMCR). - Guillermo López (Professor and Head of Department, Faculty of Communication at Universitat de València, Spain). - Dolors Palau Sampío (Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Communication at Universitat de València, Spain). - Eva Campos (Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Communication at Universidad de Valladolid, Spain). *Contact email * Sara García Santamaría, sgarciasanta(a)uoc.edu -- Dr Sara García Santamaría (she/her) Postdoctoral Researcher Universitat Oberta de Catalunya sgarciasanta(a)uoc.edu UOC Av. del Tibidabo, 39 08035 Barcelona (Spain) Vice-chair of the Political Communication Section, IAMCR https://iamcr.org/s-wg/section/pol <https://iamcr.org/s-wg/section/pol> -- Latest Publications: Caring Ecologies of the New Right and Left: Populist Performances of Care during the Pandemic. *Media and Communication. * https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v10i4.5842 Politicians “Stay Home”: Left-Wing Populism and Performances of the Intimate Self on Social Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic. https://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/638 (open access) Posing with the People: Food Porn and the Far-Right in a Post-Truth Era. In Contois, E. and Kish, X. (Eds.).* #Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation*. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=58mye9fd9780252044465 Constructing Collective Identities and Solidarity in Premieres' early Speeches on Covid-19 (with Kranert et al.). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00805-x (open access) New Book: *Cuba’s Digital Revolution: Citizen Innovation and State Policy *(with Ted Henken). https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9781683402022 <https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9781683402022>

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copyright when teaching across borders--a survey for you!
by Patricia Aufderheide 03 Apr '23

03 Apr '23

Good Monday morning (DC time) and thank you again if you already took the short-short survey about your experience teaching across borders (e.g. you have a student in another country; you are coteaching with someone in another country; you're teaching in a branch of your university in another country). I hope you're feeling those waves of gratitude. If you haven't, we are so grateful if you can do that now. Here you go! https://american.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_40jQUf6enq5nUCa Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor, School of Communication (she/they) Living and working on unceded lands of Nacotchtank and Piscataway peoples Founder and Senior Research Fellow, Center for Media & Social Impact American University 4400 Massachusetts Av., NW American University, Washington, DC 20016-8017 McKinley Hall 323 @paufder @cmsimpact cmsimpact.org<http://cmsimpact.org> paufder(a)american.edu<mailto:paufder@american.edu> 202-885-2069 office 240-643-4805 mobile Zoom Office Hours: https://american.zoom.us/j/96788556467?pwd=eFNpa2JMWlZQRm5pT1Z0b3RVUlRXQT09 Reclaiming Fair Use--t<https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022637419X?pf_rd_p=d1f45e03-8b73-4c9a-9be…>he second edition is out, with new stories, quizzes and entirely new chapters on the surprising success of fair use in enabling creativity!

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[Last call for papers] 2nd Workshop on Novel Evaluation Approaches for Text Classification Systems
by Bjorn Ross 03 Apr '23

03 Apr '23

2nd Workshop on Novel Evaluation Approaches for Text Classification Systems Co-located with ICWSM 2023, 5 June 2023, Limassol, Cyprus https://neatclass-workshop.github.io/ The automatic or semiautomatic analysis of textual data is a key approach to analyse the massive amounts of user-generated content online, from the identification of sentiment in text and topic classification to the detection of abusive language, misinformation or propaganda. However, the development of such systems faces a crucial challenge. Static benchmarking datasets and performance metrics are the primary method for measuring progress in the field, and the publication of research on new systems typically requires demonstrating an improvement over state-of-the-art approaches in this way. Yet, these performance metrics can obscure critical failings in current models. Improvements in metrics often do not reflect improvements in the real-world performance of models. There is clearly a need to rethink performance evaluation for text classification and analysis systems to be usable and trustable. If unreliable systems achieve astonishing scores with traditional metrics, how do we recognise progress when we see it? The goal of the Workshop on Novel Evaluation Approaches for Text Classification Systems (NEATCLasS) is to promote the development and use of novel metrics for abuse detection, hate speech recognition, sentiment analysis and similar tasks within the community, to better be able to measure whether models really improve upon the state of the art, and to encourage a wide range of models to be tested on these new metrics. Recently there have been attempts to address the problem of benchmarks and metrics that do not represent performance well. For example, in abusive language detection, there are both static datasets of hard-to-detect examples (Röttger et al. 2021) and dynamic approaches for generating such examples (Calabrese et al. 2021). On the platform DynaBench (Kiela et al. 2021), benchmarks are dynamic and constantly updated with hard-to-classify examples, avoiding overfitting a predetermined dataset. However, these approaches only capture a tiny fraction of issues with benchmarking. There is still much work to do. We welcome submissions discussing such new evaluation approaches, introducing new or refining existing ones, promoting the use of novel metrics for abuse detection, sentiment analysis and similar tasks within the community. Furthermore, the workshop will promote discussion on the importance, potential and danger of disagreement in tasks that require subjective judgements. This discussion will also focus on how to evaluate human annotations, and how to find the most suitable set of annotators (if any) for a given instance and task. The workshop will solicit, among others, research papers about * Issues with current evaluation metrics and benchmarking datasets * New evaluation metrics * User-centred (qualitative or quantitative) evaluation of social media text analysis tools * Adaptations and translations of novel evaluation metrics for other languages * New datasets for benchmarking * Increasing data quality in benchmarking datasets, e.g., avoidance of selection bias, identification of suitable expert human annotators for tasks involving subjective judgements * Systems that facilitate dynamic evaluation and benchmarking * Models that perform better at hard-to-classify instances and novel evaluation metrics such as AAA, DynaBench and HateCheck * Bias, error analysis and model diagnostics * Phenomena not captured by existing evaluation metrics (such as models making the right predictions for the wrong reason) * Approaches to mitigating bias and common errors * Alternative designs for NLP competitions that evaluate a wide range of model characteristics (such as bias, error analysis, cross-domain performance) * Challenges of downstream applications (in industry, computational social science and elsewhere) and reflections on how these challenges can be captured in evaluation metrics Format and Submissions We invite research papers (8 pages), position and short papers (4 pages), and demo papers (2 pages). Detailed submission instructions can be found on the workshop website. The workshop will take place as a half-day meeting on 5 June. We are looking forward to an exciting mix of activities including invited talks, paper presentations and a group discussion. Authors of accepted papers will be invited to trial an innovative format for paper presentations: presenters will be given 5 minutes to describe their research questions and hypothesis, and a group discussion will start after that. Then, presenters will be given 5 more minutes to describe their method and results, followed by a new group discussion about the interpretation and implications of such results. The group discussion to bring researchers together and collect ideas for new evaluation approaches and future work in the field. While we would encourage attending the workshop in person, we are also planning to live stream the workshop on Zoom and record talks to allow as many people as possible to participate. Authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to publish their papers through workshop proceedings by the AAAI Press. Submission instructions will be uploaded to the workshop web page in due course: https://neatclass-workshop.github.io/ Timeline * Submission link: TBD – see https://neatclass-workshop.github.io/ * Papers submission deadline: 17 April 2023 * Paper acceptance notification: 30 April 2023 * Final camera-ready paper due: 6 May 2023 * Workshop Day: 5 June 2023 Organisers Björn Ross, University of Edinburgh (Contact: b.ross(a)ed.ac.uk<mailto:b.ross@ed.ac.uk>) Roberto Navigli, Sapienza University of Rome Agostina Calabrese, University of Edinburgh Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Amazon The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. Is e buidheann carthannais a th’ ann an Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann, clàraichte an Alba, àireamh clàraidh SC005336.

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10 days to apply: Research Fellow position in memories from HIV
by Jaime García Iglesias 03 Apr '23

03 Apr '23

Hi all, Apologies for cross-posting. Just wanted to draw your attention to this job opportunity at the University of Edinburgh. It's an exciting opportunity for a 0.8FTE (4 days a week), 28-month contract, Research Fellow in the ESRC-funded "Viral Memories: from HIV to COVID-19 and beyond" led by Dr Jaime Garcia-Iglesias from the Usher Institute. You can find all details about this post in the link below and may direct enquiries to jgarcia6(a)ed.ac.uk https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CYN165/research-fellow Applications close on April 13th. Thanks a lot!

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PhD Student Position MCS Uppsala University
by Amanda Lagerkvist 03 Apr '23

03 Apr '23

Dear All, We are hiring a PhD Student in Media and Communication Studies within the project AI Design Futures (to be headed by WASP-HS Guest Professor Mark Coeckelbergh) in the Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University: https://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/join-us/details/?positionId=607229 Kind regards, Amanda Lagerkvist Amanda Lagerkvist Professor of Media and Communication Studies PI of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence<https://www.im.uu.se/research/hub-for-digtal-existence> Dept. of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University Box 513, SE- 751 20 Uppsala Office: +46(0)18-471 1522 Mobile: +46(0)73-660 0574 E-mail: amanda.lagerkvist(a)im.uu.se<mailto:amanda.lagerkvist@im.uu.se> Profile page<https://katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N7-774> New book: Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (Oxford University Press, 2022<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/existential-media-9780190925567?typ…>) När du har kontakt med oss på Uppsala universitet med e-post så innebär det att vi behandlar dina personuppgifter. För att läsa mer om hur vi gör det kan du läsa här: http://www.uu.se/om-uu/dataskydd-personuppgifter/ E-mailing Uppsala University means that we will process your personal data. For more information on how this is performed, please read here: http://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/data-protection-policy

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Call for participation: Surveillance Capitalism Conference (Pavia, 7-8 September)
by Alessandro Caliandro 03 Apr '23

03 Apr '23

Dear All (sorry for cross-posting), We are pleased to announce that the final conference of the project “V-Data - The value of digital data: enhancing citizens’ awareness and voice about surveillance capitalism”, funded by Fondazione Cariplo, will take place 7-8 September 2023 at the University of Pavia. Call for contributions and all info on programme, fees and accommodation available at: https://vdataresearch.com/outputs/cal-for-contributions/ The event will comprise panel presentations and one keynote session hosting the internationally renowned scholar Stefania Milan ( https://www.stefaniamilan.net/about-me/) A maximum of 25 papers will be selected for presentation. Preference will be given to speakers who plan to attend the conference in person, but a small number of remote presentations (no more than one per panel) may be included in the programme. We invite researchers who are active in the field of surveillance studies, surveillance capitalism, data justice, algorithmic studies, data ethics, Science and Technology Studies (STS), digital and computational methods, digital labour, media consumption and attitudes, critical consumer studies, platform studies (and many more) to submit proposals for paper presentations. Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words) to the event organisers by sending it via email to vdataresearch(a)gmail.com by 30 April 2023. What are you waiting for? Come and join us! -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alessandro Caliandro Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication Researcher V-DATA project (Surveillance Capitalism in Italy): https://vdataresearch.com/ Research Stream 3 Leader of ACTIVE-IT: https://ageingsocieties.unimib.it/active-it/ Member of Ageing Societies: https://ageingsocieties.unimib.it/ Università degli Studi di Pavia Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali Strada Nuova 65 27100 Pavia phone: 0382 984325 e-mail: alessandro.caliandro(a)unipv.it Alessandro Caliandro's Personal Meeting Room (ZOOM) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8629741587 *If you please, check out my most recent publications ; ) * Audy Martínek, P., Caliandro, A., & Denegri-Knott, J. (2022). Digital practices tracing: studying consumer lurking in digital environments. *Journal of Marketing Management*, 1-31. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2105385 Caliandro, A., & Anselmi, G. (2021). Affordances-based brand relations: An inquire on memetic brands on Instagram. *Social Media+ Society*, 7(2), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051211021367

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IERLab & TCRN visiting fellowship positions (4): Open Call for Applications, 2023
by Jin Lee 03 Apr '23

03 Apr '23

Hello colleagues, On behalf of the TikTok Cultures Research Network ( https://tiktokcultures.com/) and Influencer Ethnography Research Lab ( https://ierlab.com/) I invite you to apply for our inaugural visiting fellow schemes. The TCRN and IERLab Visiting Fellowship is an opportunity for HDRs (Higher Degree by Research) and ECRs (Early Career Researchers) to conduct research examining TikTok cultures and Influencer cultures in collaboration with scholars of TCRN and IERLab at Curtin University. In 2023, we will be awarding *4 fellowships*: 1 x TCRN HDR Visiting Fellowship, 1 x TCRN ECR Visiting Fellowship, 1 x IERLab HDR Visiting Fellowship, 1 x IERLab ECR Visiting Fellowship. All 4 fellowship positions are for a duration of 4 weeks, between May–November 2023. *About* - The *TikTok Cultures Research Network (TCRN) *is a portal for scholarly resources, research projects, and events that connects networks of qualitative scholars of various disciplines from around the world, supported by Curtin University. - The *Influencer Ethnography Research Lab (IERLab)* comprises an interdisciplinary and international group of social scientists who study the sociocultural impact of Influencers, supported by Curtin University. *Eligibility* Applicants can apply from Australia or Overseas. However, they must ensure they are able to obtain the appropriate visa for entry into Australia. We particularly welcome applicants from the Asia Pacific region. - HDR scheme: Applicants must be actively enrolled in a Masters or PhD program at the time of application. - ECR scheme: Applicants must have received their PhD in the last 5 years, or have eligible commensurate career disruption *Terms* It is expected that Fellows will be based physically at Curtin University’s Bentley campus in Perth, Western Australia, for at least 4 weeks. Fellows must commence and complete any time between June–November 2023. Fellows will need to organize their own flights, visas, accommodation, and everyday logistics. TCRN, IERLab and Curtin University will award each Fellow a one-off stipend of AUD5000 to assist with costs, and it is anticipated that Fellows will supplement this with another source of funding from their host institute. *Expectations* The TCRN/ IERLab Visiting Fellowship scheme is aimed at facilitating collaborative research opportunities and outputs. Upon completion of the programme, it is expected that Fellows will have: - Presented 1 research talk at a seminar facilitated by IERLab - Prepared 1 collaborative/co-authored journal article in close-to-completion form, aimed for publication in a high-ranking journal in the fields of media studies, communication, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, or a related field - For ECR Fellows only: Conducted 1 HDR meet-and-greet session to offer students mentoring in an area of their choosing (i.e. career development, research methods, grant applications, etc.) *How to apply:* - Please submit a 1-page CV and 1-page collaboration intent letter, and indicate when you wish to undertake the Fellowship (at least 4 weeks) by *30 April, 2023*. The collaboration intent letter should briefly include the proposed project or research topic, proposed researchers involved, and proposed output. Shortlisted candidates will be notified by 5 May 2023. - To submit your application, for further information, and for any queries, please contact TCRN Founder / IERLab Director *Professor Crystal Abidin* at *crystal.abidin[at]curtin.edu.au <http://curtin.edu.au/>*. - Shortlisted applicants will be invited to submit further materials detailing their research plan, project timeline, and methods by 19 May 2023. Successful applicants will be notified by 26 May 2023. For more info, please visit our websites: TCRN < https://tiktokcultures.com/fellowships/>, IERLab < https://ierlab.com/2023/04/03/call-for-applications-ierlab-visiting-fellows… > Thank you, Jin -- Jin Lee, PhD Research Fellow, Internet Studies, Curtin University & ARC Centre of Digital Child Affiliated researcher, Korean Research Centre of Western Australia Visit my website <https://ljin8788.wixsite.com/website> for more

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Generative AI and the Future of the University: Three Events at the University of Manchester
by Mark Carrigan 02 Apr '23

02 Apr '23

*May 10th, 17th and 24th - 3pm to 5pm (BST) at the University of Manchester, UK* Since it was launched in November 2022, Open AI’s ChatGPT has enthralled millions with its uncanny ability to respond to queries in a conversational manner. Its capacity to immediately respond to natural language questions with detailed factual knowledge has sparked debate about whether the typical forms of university-based assessment can survive this technological innovation. While there are many questions remaining to be answered about how different groups within the student community perceive these developments, and the extent to which they are already being used in assessment, there is a widespread belief within the university sector that something fundamental has shifted. This rapid growth in generative AI’s capacity to automatically produce authoritative cultural forms presents a challenge to the university as a custodian of knowledge and conferrer of credentials. In the months since this launch the underlying technology has already been incorporated into office software, search engines and productivity tools. The next iteration of Open AI’s GPT model has already been released, with vastly expanded capabilities, while universities are only beginning to come to terms with the implications of its predecessor. These developments will only accelerate as a result of intense competition within the technology sector, with capital flowing into investment in generative AI in pursuit of market dominance. Our students will work in environments where the automated production of content is ubiquitous, leaving us with the challenge of preparing them for this future while preserving the integrity of university assessments. Furthermore, our own working practices are already being changed by generative AI, with scholarly publishers already formulating policies about co-authorship with tools like Chat-GPT. If generative AI continues to develop in this way then any field which involves knowledge production or knowledge exchange will inevitably be transformed. This has profound implications not only for how we teach and assess our students, but also the working lives which they will lead over coming decades. Many questions are raised by these developments including: How do we prepare our students for these developments? How do we help them distinguish between better and worse uses of generative AI? How do we ensure they understand the epistemic limits of these systems? How can we support students in finding ways to work creatively with generative AI rather than relying on it as a substitute for their own engagement? There is little prospect of final answers in the near future but it feels urgent for us to begin discussing the questions. It is for this reason that DTCE Research & Scholarship are organising three in person open discussions in May in order to map out three different dimensions of this issue, reflecting an agenda which emerged from our first event in March. - How do we embed critical AI literacy in our teaching and professional training? What are the implications of generative AI for equity and social justice? What are the epistemic limitations and how are they changing? How can curricula keep up with the accelerating pace of technological change? May 10th, 3pm to 5pm, University of Manchester - How do we develop an agenda for assessment reform in a way which is adequate to these challenges? To what extent do existing definitions of ‘malpractice’ stand in the way of creative responses? Should we reconsider what we are assessing and why? How can we prepare students for a working world where generative AI is likely to be ubiquitous? May 17th, 3pm to 5pm, University of Manchester - How will training for academic staff need to change in order to cope with the speed of technological developments? What new systems and approaches could support more agile forms of knowledge sharing? What are the potential implications for academic labour and professional autonomy? May 24th, 3pm to 5pm, University of Manchester We invite colleagues to propose a 5-minute conversation starter in which they informally raise an issue which can be discussed with other attendees. This would be an informal suggestion of an issue for discussion rather than an expectation of a detailed proposal or formal presentation. Each event will involve a series of these discussions with a view to opening out conversations within a small group and identifying areas for further collaboration. Numbers will be limited to facilitate open discussion so please register as soon as you’re able to confirm attendance. We will confirm registration and finalise schedules for the three events by April 28th. *Please register and submit conversation starters here: https://forms.gle/DBcguYd84CGjagmP8 <https://forms.gle/DBcguYd84CGjagmP8>* *Please note these are not hybrid events and they will not be recorded in order to encourage the sharing of provisional ideas. It is entirely face-to-face with the intention of building on our existing scoping event in March. There are a number of online initiatives we have planned over the coming months which will facilitate participation by those who cannot attend these events in person.* markcarrigan.net <http://www.markcarrigan.net/> | @theplatformuni <http://www.twitter.com/theplatformuni/> LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-c-516017123/> | Soundcloud <https://soundcloud.com/mark-carrigan> | Youtube <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCflmX41wlvtXPIhy51Wfonw/videos> | Recent publications <https://manchester.padlet.org/j04936mc/jbob1uin0weo43dh> *I occasionally send e-mail outside of normal hours as my preferred way of balancing multiple commitments. Please don't feel obligated to respond to this e-mail until your own working hours have resumed. *

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