November 4, 2022
Co-Director reflects on the long-term view of technology
UW iSchool
Co-Director Batya Friedman tackled the difficult questions in a recent article by the University of Washington’s School of Information: Does it make life better for people, now and in the future? Does it account for human values? Is it something we even need in the first place? Throughout the article, she discusses past work on Value […]
MoreApril 28, 2022
Tech Policy Lab Releases Whitepaper on Agricultural Technology Policy
Ways to Grow: New Directions for Agricultural Technology Policy New Tech Policy Lab whitepaper highlights need for balance between expanding agricultural technology and investment supporting regional production SEATTLE, Wash., April 27, 2022 – The pandemic opened our eyes to a longstanding reality: the American food system cannot handle disruption. And there is another crisis on […]
MoreJanuary 27, 2022
Co-Director highlights arising security threats with increased used of AR and the metaverse
VentureBeat
TPL Co-Director Tadayoshi Kohno and TPL Faculty Associate Franziska Roesner were featured in VentureBeat’s new piece on the metaverse with regards to their paper that calls into question the new immersive nature of AR. Forthcoming AR technologies “may explicitly interface with the body and brain, with sophisticated body-sensing and brain-machine interface technologies”, they said, and “the immersive […]
MoreJanuary 11, 2022
Tech Policy Lab Releases Biennial Report
The Tech Policy Lab is please to share our 2020-2021 Biennial Report. Highlights include the Lab’s work on privacy and COVID, mitigating bias in AI systems, using storytelling to explain tech policy, and technology’s relationship to food security. http://techpolicylab.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Tech-Policy-Biennial-Report-2021-Final.pdf
MoreDecember 10, 2021
Data Statements highlighted in SpeechTechMag
Speech Technology Magazine
Co-Director and Professor Batya Friedman along with Faculty Associate and Professor Emily M. Bender’s recent paper titled “Data Statements for Natural Language Processing: Toward Mitigating System Bias and Enabling Better Science,” was highlighted in a natural language processing article by SpeechTechMag. It discussed AI in facial recognition systems and how data statements are key in understanding why […]
MoreMarch 20, 2019
Toward Inclusive Tech Policy Design: A Method for Underrepresented Voices to Strengthen Tech Policy Documents
New research published in Ethics of Information Technology introduces the Diverse Voices method and reports on two case studies demonstrating its use: one with a white paper on augmented reality technology, and the other with a strategy document on automated driving vehicle technologies.
MoreFebruary 5, 2019
Data Statements for NLP: Toward Mitigating System Bias and Enabling Better Science
New Research
In research published in Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, experts in information science and computational linguistics propose data statements as a design solution and professional practice for natural language processing technologists to help mitigate issues related to exclusion and bias.
MoreOctober 16, 2018
New Research on Adversarial Machine Learning
Last fall, a team of researchers with the Lab’s Ivan Evtimov, Earlence Fernandes, and Co-Director Yoshi Kohno shared research on ArXiv showing that malicious alterations to real world objects could cause devices to “misread” the image. Specifically, the team tricked an object classifier, like those present in self-driving cars, into misidentifying a stop sign as a […]
MoreOctober 18, 2017
Exploring ADINT: Using Ad Targeting for Surveillance on a Budget
New research by former CSE Ph.D. student Paul Vines, Lab Faculty Associate Franzi Roesner, and Faculty Co-Director Yoshi Kohno demonstrates how targeted advertising can be used for personal surveillance. From “Exploring ADINT: Using Ad Targeting for Surveillance on a Budget – or – How Alice Can Buy Ads to Track Bob” The online advertising ecosystem […]
MoreAugust 10, 2017
DNA Sequencing Tools Lack Robust Protections Against Cybersecurity Risks
In first, UW team infects computer using synthetic DNA molecules Rapid improvement in DNA sequencing has sparked a proliferation of medical and genetic tests that promise to reveal everything from one’s ancestry to fitness levels to microorganisms that live in your gut. A new study from University of Washington researchers that analyzed the security hygiene […]
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