Public Trust, Deliberative Engagement and Health Data Projects: Beyond Legal Provisions

Categories: journal article

Title: Public Trust, Deliberative Engagement and Health Data Projects: Beyond Legal Provisions Authors: Nishtha Bharti, Cian O’Donovan, Melanie Smallman, James Wilson Journal: Engaging Science, Technology, and Society Abstract In England, a new scheme for collating and sharing General Practice data has faced resistance from various quarters and has been deferred repeatedly. While insufficient communication and … Read More

The politics of robotics research

Categories: journal article

Title: What is robotics made of? The interdisciplinary politics of robotics research Authors: Ola Michalec, Cian O’Donovan and Mehdi Sobhani Journal: Humanities & Social Sciences Communications Download full paper: nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00737-6 Abstract: Under framings of grand challenges, robotics has been proposed as a solution to a wide range of societal issues such as road safety, ageing … Read More

Technology and Human Capabilities in UK Makerspaces

Categories: journal article

Title: Technology and Human Capabilities in UK Makerspaces Authors: Cian O’Donovan and Adrian Smith Download full paper: 10.1080/19452829.2019.1704706 Abstract: The relationship between technology and human capabilities is an ambivalent one. The same technology can expand capabilities for some users under certain circumstances, whilst diminishing capabilities for others situated differently. In this paper we analyse human … Read More

Minor frictions 3: virtual wards, real exclusions

Categories: research notes

So here’s a lovely paper from from David Budtz Pedersen and Rolf Hvidtfeldt that starts deals with real world causality head-on. They tell us that if we’re serious about impact, we need to start taking the micro foundations of impact seriously. What I most like is the attention to absorptive capacity and dispostions. That is, … Read More

Evaluating post-pandemic plans for social care data infrastructures

Categories: book chapter

Author: Cian O’Donovan Publication: Forthcoming chapter in Pandemic and Beyond Volume 4: Law and Ethics. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8197546 Abstract COVID-19 exposed long standing neglect in UK social care. This neglect cost lives. It underpinned failings in preparedness within the sector and failures in immediate responses by governments. Data, and the infrastructures that … Read More

Providing ethics advice in a pandemic, in theory and in practice

Categories: journal article

Title: Providing ethics advice in a pandemic, in theory and in practice: A taxonomy of ethics advice Authors: James Wilson, Jack Hume, Cian O’Donovan, Melanie Smallman First published: 28 July 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13208 Abstract The pandemic significantly raised the stakes for the translation of bioethics insights into policy. The novelty, range and sheer quantity of the … Read More

Minor frictions 2: attention is all you need

Categories: research notes

– things I’ve read this week Attention is all you need “In deep learning, nothing is ever just about the equations. It is how you . . . put them on the hardware, it’s a giant bag of black magic tricks that only very few people have truly mastered,” Uszkoreit says. Once these were applied, primarily by Shazeer whom … Read More

TAS ’23: Empowering future care workforces

Categories: journal article

Presented at https://symposium.tas.ac.uk/ O’Donovan, C., Caleb-Solly, P., Kumar, P., Russell, S., & Williams, R. (2023, July 11). Empowering future care workforces: Scoping human capabilities to leverage assistive robotics. Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS ’23). TAS ’23, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.1145/3597512.3600210 Here’s the poster presented at TAS:

University Campus Living Labs

Categories: journal article

Nyborg, S., Horst, M., O’Donovan, C., Bombaerts, G., Hansen, M., Takahashi, M., Viscusi, G., & Ryszawska, B. (2023). University Campus Living Labs: Unpacking Multiple Dimensions of an Emerging Phenomenon. Science & Technology Studies. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.120246 — A paper from the SCALINGS project on co-creation across Europe For you if… you are interested in the evolution of … Read More

Minor frictions 1: ai’s control layers

Categories: Uncategorized

— links from the past week Governance control layers for AI ($) https://www.ft.com/content/065b00d2-1f6b-490b-ab6a-96be7ee8c7de Elaine Moore in the FT has the the most prescient quote from an AI/ML tech boss you’re likely to read this week: The implication is this – AI/ML technologies on their own aren’t magic. To work and to be trusted to work … Read More