Minor frictions 3: virtual wards, real exclusions

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

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

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

– 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

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

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

— 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

Evidence submission: Parliamentary inquiry into digital exclusion and the cost of living

Written evidence submission to the UK Parliament’s Communications and Digital Committee Inquiry into digital exclusion and the cost of living Authors: Ralitsa Hiteva, Cian O’Donovan, Kate Simpson You can see the Communications and Digital Committee’s full report, which cites us, here: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/119062/html/