I was honored to have been awarded a $90k grant from the New America foundation as part of their Public Interest Technology program. Over the past year, a group of almost 20 IU students have partnered with the Laurie Burns McRobbie Serve IT Clinic to develop new tools for serving the Bloomington community using generative AI technologies. You can read all about the Serve AI grant project here.

This week I will be headed to the IEEE ICRA@40 Conference in Rotterdam to help conduct a series of oral history interviews with leading roboticists. This is part of a larger IEEE Robotics History> project with which I am involved.

I am pleased to note that the 3rd Edition of our book Computer: A History of the Information Machine has been translated into Italian and Japanese. And so, if you can read those languages, you can now order Computer. Storia dell’informatica da Babbage ai nostri giorni and コンピューティング史　人間は情報をいかに取り扱ってきたか.

I am excited to be a small part of the upcoming Granfalloon Festival hosted by the IU Arts and Humanities Council. What is a Granfalloon, you might ask? According to Wikipedia, it is an element of the fictional religion of Bokononism created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle and is a group of people who pretend to get together for a “shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is meaningless.” Which as a name for a festival whose ostensible shared purpose is to celebrate the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut is absolutely perfect.

My role in the festivities is a public discussion of Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano. This is a wonderful novel that I used to teach regularly, and given its themes of automation and technological-driven unemployment, it is highly relevant to the current moment. My talk is part of an open event at the Wonderlab Museum of Science, Health, and Technology on Saturday, May 20 from 7:30-9pm. Tickets can be ordered here. My contribution is entitled “From Player Piano to the AI Revolution, a history of labor in the computer age?”

The much more exciting participants at Granfalloon 2023 include Ted Chiang and the Flaming Lips…

The fall semester is rapidly approaching, and I am looking forward to teaching my I222: The Information Society and my I400: Computing and the Environment courses. Both courses have been updated extensively recently, which is exciting!

In celebration of Black History Month, I have been reflecting on what my scholarship might have to say about the history of African American computer programmers. On the website on the history of computer programming that developed out of my first book, I have written about some exciting recent works in the scholarship on Black programmers.

One of the most rewarding creative challenges I have as a scholar is figuring out ways to communicate my research to experts in industry. I was invited to give a talk to software developers at the game company Roblox sponsored by Women@Roblox and LGBTQIA@Roblox about my work on gender representations in the history of programming. Not only is this a wonderful opportunity to speak to people in a position to make a difference, but my children are (for a rare change) super-impressed!

I am pleased and honored to be part of the Louis Stokes Midwest Regional Center of Excellence conference on Empowering Diverse STEM Innovators to be held virtually from October 22-24.

My small contribution to the conference is to moderate a discussion with the director Shalini Kantayya about her extraordinary documentary Coded Bias, which explores the way in which historical patterns of racial bias are being reconstructed and reified within the AI algorithms used for facial recognition. I have seen this film several times now, and every time I watch it see more in it that is informative, challenging, and disturbing.

This fall we will be back to campus for in-person courses. I will be teaching my I222: The Information Society and my I400: Computing and the Environment courses.

The website Fast Company posted an excerpt of my chapter from Your Computer is on Fire today. The excerpt is from my discussion of the continuity between the industrial and informational economy, which focuses on the similarities between Sears Roebuck in the early 20th century and Amazon.com in the early 21st.