Search

Recent public controversies, ranging from the 2014 Facebook 'emotional contagion' study to psychographic data profiling by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 American presidential election, Brexit referendum and elsewhere, signal watershed moments in which the intersecting trajectories of psychology and computer science have become matters of public concern. The entangled history of these two fields grounds the application of applied psychological techniques to digital technologies, and an investment in applying calculability to human subjectivity. Today, a quantifiable psychological subject position has been translated, via 'big data' sets and algorithmic analysis, into a model subject amenable to classification through digital media platforms. I term this position the 'scalable subject', arguing it has been shaped and made legible by algorithmic psychometrics - a broad set of affordances in digital platforms shaped by psychology and the behavioral sciences. In describing the contours of this 'scalable subject', this paper highlights the urgent need for renewed attention from STS scholars on the psy sciences, and on a computational politics attentive to psychology, emotional expression, and sociality via digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an investigation on how and why computer science in Malaysia is dominated by women. Inspired by recent critical interventions in gender and technology studies, the paper aims to open up more culturally situated analyses of the gendering of technology or the technology of gendering, with the Malaysian case exemplifying the core of the argument. The paper argues along four different strands of critical thought: (1) a critique of the analytical asymmetry in the process of co-production in gender and technology studies; (2) a critique of a western bias in gender and technology studies, advocating more context sensitivity and focus on the cultural embeddedness of gender and technology relations; (3) a critique that pays more attention to spatial practices and body politics in regard to race, class and gender in relation to technology; and (4) a critique of 'western' positional notions of gender configurations that opens up for more fluid constructions of gender identity, including the many crossovers between relational and positional definitions of femininity and masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to enrich our understanding of the history and substance of cybernetics. It reviews the work of three British cyberneticians — W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask — paying attention particularly to the materiality of their practice — the strange and fascinating devices and systems that were at the heart of their work — and to the worldly projects they pursued — scientific, technological, artistic, organizational, political and spiritual. Connections are drawn between cybernetics and recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, in the hope of illuminating key features of both. The paper concludes by suggesting that the antidisciplinary impulse of contemporary science studies might find inspiration in the work of cyberneticians — that theory does not have to remain confined to the realm of theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid 1960s, researchers in computer science have famously referred to chess as the ‘drosophila’ of artificial intelligence (AI). What they seem to mean by this is that chess, like the common fruit fly, is an accessible, familiar, and relatively simple experimental technology that nonetheless can be used productively to produce valid knowledge about other, more complex systems. But for historians of science and technology, the analogy between chess and drosophila assumes a larger significance. As Robert Kohler has ably described, the decision to adopt drosophila as the organism of choice for genetics research had far-reaching implications for the development of 20th century biology. In a similar manner, the decision to focus on chess as the measure of both human and computer intelligence had important and unintended consequences for AI research. This paper explores the emergence of chess as an experimental technology, its significance in the developing research practices of the AI community, and the unique ways in which the decision to focus on chess shaped the program of AI research in the decade of the 1970s. More broadly, it attempts to open up the virtual black box of computer software – and of computer games in particular – to the scrutiny of historical and sociological analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates four different inclusion strategies used to recruit women to computer science: achieving a critical mass, educational reform, redefining the gendered symbolism of computer science and changing the content of the discipline. The relationship between and the relative importance of these four strategies are explored by looking at the extensive and successful Women and Computing Initiative (WCI) that was run by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), starting in 1996, to recruit and retain more women in computer science. The findings suggest that a direct effort to increase the relative number of women is the most important strategy. While raising the number of women recruited seems to affect the symbolic perception of computer science, this effect is difficult to achieve through attempts to directly change the symbolic image of the discipline. In addition, a substantial increase in the number of women appears to cause an improvement in their learning environment, probably because minority problems such as too much visibility and unwanted attention became less prominent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our purpose in this paper is to offer an historical account of the relationship between basic, applied and technological research, as found in a case study of the Institute of Research in Applied Mathematics and Systems (IIMAS) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). We found that researchers who have dedicated themselves full-time to the development of technology related to computing science have, in their academic careers, faced a system of evaluation based upon an ideal of basic science: this results in an adverse environment for the development of technological research; and this, in turn, has negative consequences for basic research itself, as the achievements of basic and experimental science cannot be understood nowadays without any active collaboration between technology and theory. The concepts which give rise to the different forms of evaluation at UNAM resulted more from a value-ridden symbolic construction, than from the processes of the actual production of new knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison between the development of cognitive science in France and the USA enables us to analyze some national differences linked to specific connections between the scientific, military, economic and political worlds. The influence of new practices and tools developed during World War II and the Cold War appears to be of crucial importance in understanding the development of this new field, as well as that of cybernetics, computer science, artificial intelligence and molecular biology. This paper can be considered as a study in how the differing contexts in France and the USA shaped the history of the construction of cognitive science in each of these two countries. In spite of various differences, some common aspects may be pointed out: in both cases, computer experts and psychologists using a computational modelling approach were those first engaged in the construction of cognitive science. If in France neuroscience-oriented cognitive science research was stronger than in the USA, it seems that the artificial intelligence orientation is also of growing importance in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]