CSPO Events CSPO in DC

New Tools for Science Policy

Rethinking Death in the Digital Era

What happens to your digital self after you die?

Like most people, you probably haven’t given this question much thought. But consider how much of your life involves digital assets: social media profiles, email archives, digital music and video purchases, image galleries, web browsing histories, and much more. How to deal with these digital assets after we die has become a critical consideration as more and more of our lives take place online.

Global companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon all have their own protocols for managing the digital assets of their deceased users. But until now, there has been no significant participation in such processes from any user groups or policymakers (either within or outside the United States). In this New Tools for Science Policy seminar, Faheem Hussain highlights the need to rethink postmortem design for digital products and platforms.

Faheem Hussain

New Tools for Science Policy

Gaming the Future

Re-activating creativity and play in professional spaces

Remarkable failures of foresight make headlines all the time. Despite access to powerful foresight tools, governments, companies, and individuals lack the capacity or the will to put insights about the future into practice.

In this New Tools breakfast seminar, Lauren Keeler argues that traditional foresight tools often do not effectively empower people to take action and they ask too little of people’s enormous capacity for creativity. Play, on the other hand, can motivate action, build connections, and spark innovation. Keeler introduces several games she has designed that guide individuals and organizations to envision new futures, reckon with potential shocks on the horizon, and engage in civil dialogue about important issues. Join us on April 26^th to learn about these games and play them yourself!

Lauren Withycombe Keeler

Social Media, Artificial Intelligence and National Security

The Twelfth Workshop on the Social Implications of National Security (SINS19)

This workshop will first highlight the issue of social media and AI cases that have attempted to manipulate people and describe various influence campaigns through broadcast or microtargeting strategies. Workshop participants will then consider how governments and organizations are responding to the misuse of online platforms, and evaluate various ways in which AI-based social media might be regulated internationally. The responsibility of social media platform providers will also be brought into the discussion, as algorithms can detect bot-generated and dispersed information. Finally, strategies for preventing and counter-attacking disinformation campaigns will be considered in cases and contexts where such messaging becomes a destabilizing force in communications. Emerging areas of research, such as neuromorphic computing, will be discussed in the context of cyberwarfare and espionage.

Katina Michael

How to Talk About Carbon Removal: Critical Questions About Climate Change Futures

Report Launch Event

Why do plans for keeping global temperatures below 1.5°C depend on the deployment of this hypothetical carbon removal and storage technology? Large-scale carbon capture has become an implicit, but critical, component of many climate proposals. No less an authority than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on unproven, uncertain carbon dioxide removal technologies to meet its ambitious targets.

Join Northeastern University professor Matthew Nisbet and the Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy for a discussion on a report in preparation, The Carbon Removal Debate: Asking Critical Questions about Climate Change Futures. The report works towards a common climate justice framework that can inform how various stakeholders think about, talk about, and act on this potentially transformative—but as yet still unproven—technology.

Matthew C. Nisbet