NSF Grant - The Future Matrix of Care

August 21, 2019     #research

I am very pleased to be one of the co-PIs on the recently awarded NSF Grant 1928547, FW-HTF-P: The Future Matrix of Care: Communities, Networks, and Technologies. This planning grant proposal is part of the NSF Future of Work Initiative, and “seek[s] to bring together engineers, computational social scientists, anthropologists, health experts, public servants, and community members to develop a technologically augmented, community-based vision of the workforce for care for the 21st Century.”

IEEE Golden Core Award

May 20, 2019     #media #research

I am pleased and honored to be the recipient of the IEEE Golden Core Award. A small number of Golden core awards are granted each year to persons who “served the society in significant ways throughout its 50 years … making the Golden Core group a permanent roster of the principal contributors to the society’s success.” The award is in recognition of my time serving in various roles, including editor-in-chief, of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. The IEEE has been central to the academic study of computing for more than a half-century, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have contributed to its mission.

The Secret History of Women in Coding

February 13, 2019     #research #media #gender

In today’s issue of the New York Times, the journalist Clive Thompson has published a brilliant excerpt from his forthcoming book Coders. In it he references my work on the history of women in computing.

The Environmental History of Computing

December 30, 2018     #publications

As part of a special issue of the journal Technology & Culture exploring new directions in the history of computing, my article on The Environmental History of Computing has finally been published! Describing the various ways in which computing intersects with the environment — from the mining of minerals essential to the construction of digital devices to the massive amounts of water and energy used to generate virtual commodities to the pollution associated with the production and disposal of electronics. It provides a nice preview of my forthcoming book project The Cloud is a Factory. The journal article can be download directly for readers with access to the appropriate academic subscriptions. Everyone else can view a preliminary version based on a talk that I been giving at various institutions over the past few years.

Human Agency and Autonomous Vehicles

December 06, 2018     #media

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) research group on “Practicing Evidence” is hosting an international workshop on autonomous vehicles at the Deutsches Museum entitled Who’s Driving? Agency and Evidence in the History of Technical Safety.

The goal of the workshop is to provide historical context for understanding the ethical and practical implications of driveless vehicles. I will be giving the keynote address that opens the workshop. The title of my talk is “From Giant Brains to Autonomous Vehicles, or: How We Learned to Trust AI.”

The Future of Artificial Intelligence

November 29, 2018     #media #research

At the end of November the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University hosted a two-day event gathering historians and practioners from around the world. I was pleased to be invited to participate in the opening plenary panel discussion on The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Views from History. The panel was open to the public and the livestream is available on Youtube. In the private workshop held the following day, I presented on my work on chess and artificial intelligence as well as on a new project on work, automation, and autonomous vehicles.