Last month a new research project of which I am part got underway – UnBias: Emancipating Users Against Algorithmic Biases for a Trusted Digital Economy. Its a collaboration between the Universities of Nottingham (Horizon Digital Economy Institute), Edinburgh (Informatics) and Oxford (Human Centred Computing) funded by the EPSRC through its Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security in the Digital Economy strand. Over the next two years it will look at the complex relationships between people and systems increasingly driven by personalisation algorithms and explore whether, and to what degree, citizens can judge their trustworthiness.
My role will be to lead a co-design process that will create a ‘fairness toolkit’ : raising awareness about the impact of algorithms on everyday behaviours; devising pragmatic strategies to adapt around them; and engaging policymakers and online providers. We will be working with schools and young people to co-develop the toolkit – following in the wake of previous projects exploring young people and social media, such as Digital Wildfire.
For me this project cuts to the quick of concerns at the heart of today’s society: empathy, agency, transparency and control. I will be bringing ideas and practices to the project I have been exploring from a number of different trajectories over the past few years, from my work on the Pallion project to data manifestation and reciprocal entanglements. I am particularly excited as this marks my first formal collaboration with Oxford’s Human Centred Computing research group with whom I’ve been in dialogue for a couple of years.
Giles Lane 
You must be logged in to post a comment.