Patterns in Practice

Patterns in Practice (AHRC funded) kicked off in August 2021. The project is exploring how practitioners’ beliefs, values and feelings interact to shape how they engage with and in data mining – a form of ‘narrow AI’.

The project team is me (PI), with Co-Is Erinma Ochu and Helen Kennedy, and researcher Itzelle Medina Perea.

Read more at the Patterns in Practice webiste.

Living with Data

Over the last year I’ve been working on the Living with Data project led by Helen Kennedy (Nuffield Foundation funded)

Working with researchers Susan Oman and Itzelle Medina Perea, we captured and mapped the data practices within a number of existing and proposed projects at the BBC and DWP. Team member Lulu Pinney then created visualisations of what we found. These findings and the visuals fed into the next stages of the project a survey and focus groups/interviews. Read more here and at the Living with Data project website.

CYCAT

I’ve also been part of the Cyprus Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (EU Horizon 2020 funded) since it was founded in 2018 by PI Jahna Otterbacher. As part of this project I led a sub-project at Sheffield about teaching topics related to data ethics to MSc Data Science students, which was presented at ACM FAT* 2020, and will be developing a CYCAT white paper based on this research in 2021. I also participated in the CYCAT Winter School (2021), delivering a lecture on bias in search engines with colleague Frank Hopfgartner. You can read more here and at the project website.

Crowdwork

As well as these two funded projects, I have also been engaged in ongoing work with Alessandro Checco and Elli Gerakopoulou about critical interventions in crowdworker infrastructures such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. We have a number of papers/chapters published and in the pipeline. This work was possible with a small amount of funding from the Information School. You can read more about this work here.