The Sustainable Computing Lab

Julia Zauner: Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence: Understanding Experiences of Victimisation, Support Needs and Legal Responses to Technology Inflicted Harm
2018-11-07 13:30 - 15:00 UTC
The proposed feminist phenomenological study is concerned with exploring experiences of technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) with regard to victimisation, survivor support services, and responses of the criminal justice (CJ) system. The term includes but is not limited to: the distribution of sexual content without consent, online sexual harassment, and virtual rape facilitated by technology. TFSV has neither embodied physicality nor geographical boundaries but nevertheless contains symbolic and emotional implications of violence rooted into society and with international relevance. Using qualitative methods, this research aims to understand the nature and impact of TFSV on survivors, locating these within current academic, policy and practice debates.

TFSV and its challenges are rapidly evolving. However, neither research nor governmental institutions have given much attention to TFSV. Therefore, this study is timely and contemporary. Under consideration of the continued reproduction of male supremacy and asymmetrical power relations, there is strong support to suggest the phenomenon is gendered; this therefore indicates a further need to investigate TSFV as a new means of violence against women.

The data collection proposes qualitative interviews with at least 25 survivors, 10 support practitioners, and 5 CJ representatives. The proposed analysis method is interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the meanings associated with TFSV. The research is of highest relevance for criminological and sociological research as well as the governmental body and support practitioners as it contributes to the understanding of victimisation experiences and legal responses to a phenomenon which is yet to be explored.

About the Author: Julia is a researcher in criminology with a specialisation on gender-based violence in the digital age. For her Master’s dissertation she was concerned with the victim-blaming tendencies of the British educational system surrounding campaigns on the sharing and creating of intimate images. Julia is a board member of the Empower Project Scotland – an intersectional feminist charity working with communities to educate on tech abuse. She currently undertakes a traineeship at the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency before starting a PhD in autumn 2019.

Max Schrems: Post-GDPR hangover in Austria and beyond?
2018-10-31 14:00 - 15:00

Axel Polleres: The surprising responses you get to GDPR data requests - an initial assessment
2018-10-17 13:30 - 15:00
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) promises to enable us to request data back from data controllers, enable data portability, and – eventually – integration of our personal information stored in different siloes. However, it’s not that easy. In this short talk I will report back from a small experiment, I started on 25th of May to issue such data requests [1]. The partially surprising responses highlight various issues and challenges that smalle and medium-sized enterprises are confronted with, when answering such requests. After the talk, we would like to invite the audience to brainstorm on how this situation could be improved, discuss about how such requests could be handled more efficiently and what would be the benefits and incentives for doing so. Disclaimer: This is work in progress; I would be happy to invite interested collaborators to summarise and publish these experiences, as I think they could be of interest to a wider audience!

1. https://doingthingswithdata.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/gdpr-day-time-to-request-your-data-automate-it/

Algorithmic Management: Designing systems which promote human autonomy
2018-09-20 - 2018-09-21 | Footer Email Signup
This workshop is part of a wider research project on Algorithmic Management which studies the structural role of algorithms as forms of management in work environments, where automated digital platforms, such as Amazon, Uber or Clickworker manage the interaction of workers through algorithms. The process of assigning or changing a sequence of individual to be completed tasks is often a fully automated process. This means that algorithms may partly act like a manager, who exercises control over a large number of decentralized workers. The goal of our research project is to investigate the interplay of control and autonomy in a managerial regime, with a specific focus on the food-delivery sector.
If you want to attend this event, please first register with Hannah Waltl <mis-sek@wu.ac.at>.
Further details about the event are available here: https://www.privacylab.at/workshop-algorithmic-management-designing-systems-which-promote-human-autonomy/
This research was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie “Privacy&Us” project (GA No. 675730).

Esther Görnemann: Ownership of personal data
2018-06-27 16:00 - 17:00
Personal data are not legally defined as property. Yet, the markets for consumer profiles with detailed data points are flourishing and personal data is often referred to as the currency that pays for digital products and services. The amassed information about consumers has become a valuable asset for many businesses.
This session will focus on similarities and differences of legal property and data possession and shed light on arguments supporting and rejecting legal ownership of personal data. We will have a look at the legal status quo according to the GDPR and try to draw the line between intellectual property and data protection and discuss some major ethical concerns.

Walter Peissl: Privacy @ ITA (Institut für Technikfolgen-Abschätzung)
2018-06-13 16:00 - 17:00
In our world of digitization, questions arise like: Are we witnessing the end of privacy? What’s the point of being private?
In a series of projects, the ITA investigates the short and long-term effects of being object of analysis, the erosion of privacy, and derives options for action. The analyses focus on the interrelationship between technological development, fundamental rights and the social and political consequences.
The presentation will shed light on some of the projects carried out and present some results.
Projects: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ita/de/ueber-uns/das-ita-team/peissl/projekte/?tx_indexedsearch%5B_sections%5D=0&tx_indexedsearch%5Bpointer%5D=0&tx_indexedsearch%5Bext%5D=0&tx_indexedsearch%5Btype%5D=20&tx_indexedsearch%5Bresults%5D=99999&tx_indexedsearch%5Blang%5D=0
Publications: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ita/de/ueber-uns/das-ita-team/peissl/publikationen/

Sarah Spiekermann: The Nature of the Digital and the Nature of Human Beings
2018-06-05 13:00 - 14:30
In this talk I will talk about some key characteristics determining the nature of the digital. Specifically, I will talk about the naturally devided,unsaturated and incomplete nature of the digital that triggers an auto-completion mechanism in human beings. I will progress by outlining that digital technologies as we know them since broadband introduction are inherently connected to light and change-rates; both mechanisms that enforce human attention. These mechanisms of change are combined these days with addictive design and the introduction of social network echoes. The latter again bind human to the Net are Narcissus was bound to his mirror image.

Based on these observations I will outline a number of requirements we would need to consider for Ethical Machines in the light of the nature of today’s digital technologies.

Joint Research Seminar with Erich Schweighofer
2018-05-30 15:00 - 17:00
Following the previous joint seminars between the Lab and the team of Erich Schweighofer we decided to organise a new joint seminar on 30 May 2017. Here is a provisional agenda for the seminar:
15:00 – 15:10: Brief round of introductions from participants
15:10 – 15:45: Eliska Pirkova – Freedom expression in technology
15:45 – 16:20: Jakob Zanol – Protection of Publicly Available Data under the GDPR
16:20 – 16:55: Erwin Filtz – Building a legal knowledge graph.
16:55 – 17:00: Conclusion and next steps

Konrad Lachmayer: Artificial Intelligence and the Concept of Law - Some insights from autonomous and self-learning driving
2018-05-23 16:30 - 17:30
Regulating artificial intelligence by legal means challenges the foundations of law. Law addresses human beings, groups and societies. While criminal law is based on a concept of guilt, civil law creates legal attribution via liability. Regulatory approaches try to deal with artificial intelligence in the same way as they deal with human beings. Addressing intelligent systems, robots and machines by legal means shakes up the foundations of law.
The presentation will evaluate the concept of law. The following questions will be discussed: How can law address artificial intelligence? What is the (still existing) potential of law and what are its limits? How should law and code interrelate? Is it necessary to re-conceptualise law or to regulate artificial intelligence beyond law by other means?

About the speaker:
Konrad Lachmayer is professor of public law, European law and foundations of law at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna and visiting fellow at Durham Law School (UK). He studied law at the University of Vienna and was visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, the Max-Planck Institute of International Law in Heidelberg and the Central European University in Budapest. In his research he focuses on comparative constitutional law, digitalization of law as well as Austrian public law.

Laura Bauer & Ben Wagner: Interdisciplinary perspectives on sustainable computing
2018-05-17 16:00 - 17:00
While there are increasing international debates about sustainable and value-based computing, it is notable that many of these debates tend to re-invent the wheel. We believe that by looking more closely at existing debates in sustainability sciences and engineering, it is possible to gain a better understanding of what sustainable computing could be.
This is particularly the case, as debates about sustainability typically focus on ecological or ‘green’ aspects while ignoring digital technologies. This is because these debates see digital technologies are typically seen as neutral tools that cannot and should not embody values. As a result we see an urgent need for a greater debate between these two fields.

María Fernández Escudero: Code is law or law is code? Governance and Artificial Intelligence
2018-05-09 16:00 - 17:00
What we called science fiction a few years ago, nowadays is called Artificial Intelligence (AI). Despite its laboratory origin, AI is currently on the streets, but scientists and lawyers sometimes are in pursuit of different matters. However, finding ‘the’ meeting point is urgent and mandatory. This talk reinterprets AI from the eyes of a social scientist, trying to create a common framework in which computational scientists can focus on the ‘How’, and sociologists, politicians, or legal experts must address the 4 Ws of AI to orderly incorporate it in our society : Why, What, Where, and When. The expected proposals should help us to answer the title question: should AI drive regulatory changes or, on the contrary, should law guide AI evolution?

Data Privacy Controls and Vocabularies A W3C Workshop on Privacy and Linked Data
2018-04-17 08:00 - 2018-04-18 17:00
The level of privacy and trust concerns has raised to a point where people start to refuse services. Services on the Web are often very complex orchestrations of cooperations between multiple actors. This will increase if the upcoming Internet of Things is taken into account. If the trust in such services is eroded, the growth of the Web and the growth of the digital economy is endangered. This workshop wants to address the privacy issue from the angle of data governance and transparency. And if transparency and data self determination are at stake, the challenge may also be how to convey the transparency to the user to allow for an informed self determination. This includes especially methods to generate and administer user consent, even in an IoT environment.
While the Workshop is open to a wide range of ideas, it is mainly inspired by the idea that today, we lack the tools for those wanting to be good citizens of the Web. It is related, but not limited to the work on Permissions and on Tracking protection. Because those permissions and tracking signals carry policy data, the systems have to react upon those signals. To react in a complex distributed system, the signals have to be understood by more than one implementer. The challenge is to identify the areas where such signals are needed for privacy or compliance and to make those signals interoperable. This can take the form taxonomies, vocabularies or ontologies. The most important challenge is to make policy and privacy signals interoperable and transportable within various systems, beyond the mere relation in a browsing context. In the era of upcoming privacy regulation with high fines, we need to make the data lake usable again while respecting the human user.
Because of the paradigm of data self determination, the challenge is bidirectional. Once the semantics of privacy or compliance are clear, this information also has to be presented to the user. On the Web, this is a challenge for the terminal equipment, including but not limited to browsers. E.g., the set of preferences offered to the user may vary with the capability of a service to accommodate those preferences. This needs signaling of the possible preferences (semantics) and a way to communicate the selection back. Such exchange can be protocol- or data driven. Where it is data driven, the policy semantics are transported over whatever channel is available, e.g. using linked data.

Javier D. Fernández: Green Big Data
2018-03-28 16:00 - 17:00
As more and more systems and personal devices become pervasive and interoperable, an increasing amount of sensitive and interconnected data is prone to vulnerability, which leads to the question how Big Data potential for business, science and society can be balanced with societal expectations in terms of data protection and privacy legislation. In this talk, we will introduce some of the open technical challenges around the implementation of the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and how our project “SPECIAL”, a H2020 research and innovation action, provides tools for enterprises to run their Big Data-driven businesses in a privacy-aware manner.

Sabine Beck, Netpeace: Talking about peace in the internet and on social media, means talking about how to get rid of hate and harassment - especially concerning female victims
2018-03-21 16:00 - 17:00
Women make up half of the earth’s population. Women have been and still are a strong driving force and engine to bring about social change. The women’s movements of the past 150 years have been instrumental in transforming society, such as enforcing women’s suffrage.
Restrictive movements and right-wing populists are attacking women, not only because it is obvious that progressive ideas and demands are usually initiated by feminists. Women’s rights are human rights – therefore both are high on the agenda to fight against of the new right.
Online violence against women is not only easy to accomplish and relatively safe to perform, but also effective: someone who attacks women, intimidates not only the affected individual, but also the many who are online witnessing the attack.
The result is simple and easy to foresee: women fall silent and withdraw from public discussions. Aggressive men take over and determine the discourse, followed by a shift in public perception and political sentiment. A recent study by Amnesty International shows that women who experience online hate or abuse, also feel threatened physically, fear for their live and families and are less likely to speak out on other occasions.
So we must discuss actions and strategies how to defend women´s rights in online spaces to defend democracy.
Sabine Beck, speaker of the Netpeace initiative at Greenpeace will provide a brief overview followed by a discussion.

CANCELLED: Javier D. Fernández: Green Big Data
2018-01-31 14:00 - 16:00

Workshop on Regulating Artificial Intelligence
2018-01-19 10:00 - 12:30
‘I am pessimistic about AI but an optimist because of will’
Artificial intelligence and big data are taking an increasingly important place in our everyday life. What used to be once a niche research topic in computer science, has become now the main leverage of the digital revolution. From this perspective AI is becoming a major strategic tool in hand of states and large corporates to shape the future. In this talk, we will first attempt a taxonomy of different ways algorithms and AI are used as society changer tools. After a critical assessment of the different categories we will describe how various countries (USA, China, Europe, etc.…) are currently integrating AI into their national development strategies and evaluate the benefit and risks involved with these strategies.

Event Program
10:00 – 10:05: Introduction and Overview: Dr. Ben Wagner, WU Vienna
10:05 – 11:00: Regulating Artificial Intelligence: Prof. Dr. Kave Salamatian, University of Savoie
11:00 – 11:15: Governance of Algorithms: Dr. Florian Saurwein, Austrian Academy of Sciences
11:15 – 12:25: Discussion
12:25 – 12:30: Concluding remarks: Dr. Ben Wagner, WU Vienna

About the Speakers:
Kave Salamatian, PhD, is a professor of computer science at University of Savoie and Fellow at the Centre for Internet & Human Rights (CIHR). His main areas of researches are Internet measurement, modelling and networking information theory. He was previously reader at Lancaster University, UK and associate professor at University Pierre et Marie Curie. Kavé has graduated with a Phd in Computer Science in 1998 from Paris SUD-Orsay university, where he worked on joint source channel coding applied to multimedia transmission over Internet
In a former life, he graduated with a MBA, and worked on market floor as a risk analyst and on enjoyed being an urban traffic modeler for some years. In particular, he is interested in cyber strategy and explaining that guaranteeing freedom of speech and equal access to network is not only a human right obligation by is also the wisest strategic decision that a government can take in Internet domain.
Florian Saurwein is a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies (CMC), Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt. He is part of the ‘Media Accountability & Media Change’ Research Group, where he leads the Tripple A research project on Algorithms, Automation and Accountability. He previously worked at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research of the University of Zurich and completed his PhD at the University of Vienna.

Soheil Human: Towards a Cognitive Information Economy: Dealing with the Personalisation-Privacy Paradox by Computational Cognitive Modelling of Human Needs and Values
2018-01-10 14:00 - 16:00
Need satisfaction plays a fundamental role in human wellbeing. This notwithstanding, the concept of need has not yet found its place in information systems and online tools. Furthermore, assessing needs itself remains a labor-intensive, mostly offline activity, where only a limited support by computational tools is available. In this talk, first, I present OpeNeeD, a family of ontologies for representing human needs data. Then, I introduce Polyphony, an ontology for representing epistemic disagreements, and discuss how Polyphony can contribute in development of pluralist ontologies for representing human needs and values. Later, by proposing the concept of cognitive information economy, I discuss how the personalisation-privacy paradox can be dealt with computational cognitive models of human needs satisfaction.

Eliška Pírková: Human Rights Lost in Transition: Hate Speech 3.0
2017-12-13 14:00 - 15:00
Private entities, such as Social Network Sites (SNS) exercise a significant control over the flow of information online. They have a power to decide what kind of information can be accesses and what form of expression is or is not permissible. Hence, this ability makes them a powerful force in facilitating or hindering freedom of expression online. Consequently, it imposes a challenge to human rights law which has traditionally viewed human rights as the responsibility of state. The presentation aims to demonstrate how private companies operate as the gatekeepers of information society, especially at the intersection of regulation, law and human rights. After a brief introduction of the term ‘Hate Speech 3.0’, I critically assess the existing approach to the gatekeepers’ liability for potentially harmful content. The national legislative tools, the corporate governance model represented by soft law mechanisms as well as non-state based models of governance will be examined in detail. I argue that the current state of art suggests that we are facing a regulatory paradox of free expression online, which is not able to provide an adequate response to this phenomenon. A starting point of a future possible model that can potentially lead to more positive outcomes will be drawn in the final conclusion.

Ben Wagner: Governing Automation and Algorithms responsibly
2017-12-06 12:00 - 14:00 | SVasili

Sarah Spiekermann: P7000: IEEE’s first standard on Ethical Systems Engineering
2017-11-29 13:00 - 15:00

Markus Sabadello: "Internet Identity: Self-sovereign ID vs. (national) eIDs”
2017-11-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Hypeneko
Historically, nation states have always played a vital role in identifying their citizens. Today, this is also reflected in the digital world, where governments issue eID cards to their own citizens (and in some cases even to foreigners, such as in the case of the Estonian eResidency program). In Austria, a number of institutions and companies (Federal Chancellery, Ministry of the Interior, Austrian State Printing House, A-Trust, etc.) provide the infrastructure for the Austrian “Bürgerkarte”, a classic centralized digital identity system which is currently undergoing a major architectural revision. At the same time, during the last few years we have been witnessing fast growing interest in decentralized, privacy-enhancing, and so-called “self-sovereign” digital identity technologies, which put individuals in control of their own digital identity, without dependencies on any state or company. In many cases (especially blockchain), the proponents of such technologies are critical of traditional authorities.
In this talk, let us look at both the different political assumptions and the different technological approaches behind “self-sovereign” identity vs. national identity, and let us explore if they are really conflicting ends of a spectrum, or if they are perhaps rather compatible and complementary.

Sabrina Kirrane: Status Update on SPECIAL
2017-11-20 11:00 - 12:00

Bernadette Kamleitner: Data Ownership
2017-11-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Aaron Neo

Jeffrey Sachs: AI, Ubiquitous Computing and the Question of Ethics
2017-11-09 12:00 - 16:00

Christiane Wendehorst: The ALI-ELI Principles for a Data Economy: Investment protection, data protection, and other challenges
2017-10-16 12:00 - 14:00

Christian Göbel: Scraping & online complaints platforms in China
2017-10-05 12:00 - 13:00
We look forward to a small lunch meeting on Thursday 5.10.2017 we’re organising about scraping online complaints platforms in China with Christian Göbel from the University of Vienna (http://christiangoebel.net/).

Christian will be talking about web scraping in the context of a 5-year ERC project on complaint platforms in China and will be joined by Axel Polleres & Ben Wagner for lunch in the D2 lounge at 12:00 on Thursday 5.10.2017.

Anyone who is interested in web scraping methods or studying authoritarian regimes online is very welcome to join the lunch meeting.

PrivOn2016 @ ISWC2016 - 4th International Workshop on Society, Privacy and the Semantic Web - Policy and Technology
2016-10-17 09:00 - 2016-10-18 17:00

Lab Launch - Future Privacy & Data Protection in a Global Big Data World
2016-09-30 08:30 - 18:00

ITalks: Ethics & Value Based Design – Can we Create a Better Future?
2016-09-29 17:30 - 21:00

Prof. Charles Ess - "Are Good Lives Possible in a (post-) Digital Era?"
2016-05-11 12:00 - 13:30
Abstract
Are Good Lives Possible in a (post-) Digital Era?
I begin with an account of our human interests in a good life as circumscribed by shared interests in contentment, well-being, and (self-) fulfillment in relationship with others. I then ask how such good lives might be possible vis-à-vis two concrete examples of contemporary ICT instantiations: (1) “smart technologies,” including various forms of ambient intelligence and pre-emptive computing, and (2) social robots, specifically carebots and sexbots. My larger argument – drawing in part on recent approaches to ethical ICT design, including Spiekermann (2015) – is that lives of human flourishing and contentment remain possible in a post-digital era. To achieve these, however, requires that we as human beings pay greater attention to our embodied and relational lives, so as to cultivate the skills and abilities (virtues) needed to sustain human autonomy vis-à-vis increasingly sophisticated technological environments and infrastructures designed to offload our agency in the names of economic efficiency and convenience.
Bio
Charles Ess is Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, Norway. He works at the intersections of philosophy, computing, applied ethics, comparative philosophy, and media studies, with specific focus on research ethics, Digital Religion, and virtue ethics in media and communication, specifically social robots. Recent publications include Digital Media Ethics (Polity Press, 2009, 2nd ed. 2013), (co-editor) The Handbook of Internet Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and ‘What’s love got to do with it? Robots, sexuality, and the arts of being human,’ in M. Nørskov (ed.), Social Robots: Boundaries, Potential, Challenges, 57–79 (Ashgate, 2015). In 2015–16, he was a fellow of the Research Group The Ethics of Copying at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld, Germany.
