Does Siri Have a Soul? Exploring Voice Assistants Through Shinto Design Fictions

It can be difficult to critically reflect on technology that has become part of everyday rituals and routines. To combat this, speculative and fictional approaches have previously been used by HCI to decontextualise the familiar and imagine alternatives. In this work we turn to Japanese Shinto narratives as a way to defamiliarise voice assistants, inspired by the similarities between how assistants appear to 'inhabit' objects similarly to kami. Describing an alternate future where assistant presences live inside objects, this approach foregrounds some of the phenomenological quirks that can otherwise easily become lost. Divorced from the reality of daily life, this approach allows us to reevaluate some of the common interactions and design patterns that are common in the virtual assistants of the present.Comment: 11 pages, 2 images. To appear in the Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20

Strangers in the Room: Unpacking Perceptions of 'Smartness' and Related Ethical Concerns in the Home

The increasingly widespread use of 'smart' devices has raised multifarious ethical concerns regarding their use in domestic spaces. Previous work examining such ethical dimensions has typically either involved empirical studies of concerns raised by specific devices and use contexts, or alternatively expounded on abstract concepts like autonomy, privacy or trust in relation to 'smart homes' in general. This paper attempts to bridge these approaches by asking what features of smart devices users consider as rendering them 'smart' and how these relate to ethical concerns. Through a multimethod investigation including surveys with smart device users (n=120) and semi-structured interviews (n=15), we identify and describe eight types of smartness and explore how they engender a variety of ethical concerns including privacy, autonomy, and disruption of the social order. We argue that this middle ground, between concerns arising from particular devices and more abstract ethical concepts, can better anticipate potential ethical concerns regarding smart devices.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure. To appear in the Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '20

Supporting Real-Time Contextual Inquiry Through Sensor Data

A key challenge in carrying out product design research is obtaining rich contextual information about use in the wild. We present a method that algorithmically mediates between participants, researchers, and objects in order to enable real-time collaborative sensemaking. It facilitates contextual inquiry, revealing behaviours and motivations that frame product use in the wild. In particular, we are interested in developing a practice of use driven design, where products become research tools that generate design insights grounded in user experiences. The value of this method was explored through the deployment of a collection of Bluetooth speakers that capture and stream live data to remote but co-present researchers about their movement and operation. Researchers monitored a visualisation of the real-time data to build up a picture of how the speakers were being used, responding to moments of activity within the data, initiating text conversations and prompting participants to capture photos and video. Based on the findings of this explorative study, we discuss the value of this method, how it compares to contemporary research practices, and the potential of machine learning to scale it up for use within industrial contexts. As greater agency is given to both objects and algorithms, we explore ways to empower ethnographers and participants to actively collaborate within remote real-time research

Technology and Big Data Meet the Risk of Terrorism in an Era of Predictive Policing and Blanket Surveillance

Surveillance studies suffer from a near-total lack of empirical data, partially due to the highly secretive nature of surveillance programs. However, documents leaked by Edward Snowden in June of 2013 provided unprecedented proof of top-secret American data mining initiatives that covertly monitor electronic communications, collect, and store previously unfathomable quantities of data. These documents presented an ideal opportunity for testing theory against data to better understand contemporary surveillance. This qualitative content analysis compared themes of technology, privacy, national security, and legality in the NSA documents to those found in sets of publicly available government reports, laws, and guidelines, finding inconsistencies in the portrayal of governmental commitments to privacy, transparency, and civil liberties. These inconsistencies are best explained by the risk society theoretical model, which predicts that surveillance is an attempt to prevent risk in globalized and complex contemporary societies

Technology and Big Data Meet the Risk of Terrorism in an Era of Predictive Policing and Blanket Surveillance

Surveillance studies suffer from a near-total lack of empirical data, partially due to the highly secretive nature of surveillance programs. However, documents leaked by Edward Snowden in June of 2013 provided unprecedented proof of top-secret American data mining initiatives that covertly monitor electronic communications, collect, and store previously unfathomable quantities of data. These documents presented an ideal opportunity for testing theory against data to better understand contemporary surveillance. This qualitative content analysis compared themes of technology, privacy, national security, and legality in the NSA documents to those found in sets of publicly available government reports, laws, and guidelines, finding inconsistencies in the portrayal of governmental commitments to privacy, transparency, and civil liberties. These inconsistencies are best explained by the risk society theoretical model, which predicts that surveillance is an attempt to prevent risk in globalized and complex contemporary societies

Market Definition and Free Online Services: The Prospect of Personal Data as Price

No abstract available

Surveillance and Security:Protecting Electricity Utilities and other Critical Infrastructures

Critical infrastructures – such as electricity networks, power stations and Smart Grids – are increasingly monitored and controlled by computing and communication technologies. The need to address security and protection of electricity infrastructures with a high priority has broadly been recognized. This is driven by many factors, including the rapid evolution of threats and consistent technological advancements of malicious actors as well as potentially catastrophic consequences of disruptions of such systems. Surveillance and security technologies are traditionally used in these contexts as a protection mechanism that maintains situational awareness and provides appropriate alerts. Surveillance is a cumbersome process because of the need to monitor a diverse set of objects, but it is absolutely essential to detect promptly the occurrence of adverse events or conditions. The aims of this paper are twofold: First, we describe two surveillance architectures in which different technologies can be used jointly for boosting the safety and security of electricity utilities and other key resources and critical infrastructures. Second, we review the typical surveillance and security technologies and evaluate them in the context of critical infrastructures, which may help in making recommendations and improvements for the future. To accomplish these aims, we extracted and consolidated information from major survey papers. This led to identifying the surveillance and security technologies, their application areas, and challenges that they face. We also investigate the perceived performance of the identified technologies in critical infrastructures. The latter comes from interviewing experts who operate in critical infrastructures, and thus provide indications for protecting critical infrastructures, not least because of their increasing use of cyber-physical elements