"Actor-Network Theory and Crime Studies: Explorations in Science and Technology" ed. by Dominique Rober

In crime control and criminal justice, science and technology are relied on to establish guilt, develop preventive policies, track suspects, and much more. This raises questions as to how facts about criminal behaviour are established, how surveillance technologies spread and how crime prevention affects everyday experiences. To answer such questions, the editors of Actor-Network Theory and Crime Studies propose, crime studies need to move beyond critical constructionist approaches. Dominique Robert and Martin Dufresne argue that these approaches have in too many cases led to studies that critique and even ‘debunk’ without giving satisfactory accounts of how science and technology affect legal and policing practices and vice versa. [...

Data Mining 'Problem Youth'

This chapter examines how a Dutch city attempted to use data mining to profile 'problem youth'. It challenges zooming as the metaphor that guides the use of this statistical technique. To see something from close by, it is argued, is a situated practice. Instead of presenting the object in more detail, a new object is brought into being. Two modes of situated improvisation are identified. These involve the interplay of artefacts, bodies of knowledge, and normativities. Attending to metaphors in practice may thus be a useful starting point to change the terms by which digital identities are produced. Key words: algorithms, big data, statistics, digital identity, materiality, vision, surveillanc

Surveillance in the Supermarket

In 2007, a city in the Netherlands provided a shop owner with a facial recognition system to detect known shop thieves. This camera system compared faces of individuals in the crowd with police photos of known local shoplifters. In this paper, I ask how facial recognition intervenes in the relations between the various actors involved in monitoring and controlling shop crime. In particular, I focus on how technology affects the pluralisation of surveillance, understood here as the state’s effort to mobilise new types of actors. By studying surveillance as a situated practice of making shoplifters visible, I show how facial recognition was in this case part of an effort to further enlist the supermarket in monitoring petty crime. I furthermore attend to the contingencies of this process. While surveillance technologies can potentially engage new actors, they do not necessarily do so as they may refuse to take part in a particular mode of surveillance. In other words, not only subjects of surveillance resist, resistances may also exist within the networks that perform surveillance

Data Scientists: A New Faction of the Transnational Field of Statistics

Big Data analytics and related methods introduce new possibilities for the generation of official statistics, but also raise the question of whether national statisticians can continue to claim the legitimate authority to generate knowledge of the state. Drawing on a collaborative ethnography of European official statistics, we follow the politics of method where statisticians position themselves in relation to data scientists. We show that data scientists do not replace national statisticians but that both professional groups are relationally reconfigured in material-semiotic practices that cut across national organisations, such as experiments, demonstrations, job descriptions, and transnational negotiations. Through the tentative definition of the ‘iStatistician’, Big Data methodologies reconfigure the f

Wat is rechtvaardige AI? Een kader voor het ontwikkelen en toepassen van algoritmes voor automatische besluitvorming

Samenvatting Vragen over eerlijkheid, rechtvaardigheid en gelijke behandeling (fairness) in kunstmatige intelligentie zijn een punt van aandacht in recente debatten over mogelijke negatieve gevolgen van de toepassing van artificial intelligence (AI) in de samenleving. Veel van deze zorgen zijn echter niet nieuw – ze komen voort uit maatschappelijke en politieke discussies over digitalisering van de samenleving in het algemeen. In de kern draaien ze om eerlijkheid, toegankelijkheid en exploi‐ teerbaarheid van digitale diensten en big data: wie heeft de middelen, de expertise en de feitelijke gegevens om maximaal gebruik te maken van digitalisering, en ten koste van wie of wat? Automatisering van besluitvorming door middel van algo‐ ritmische besluitvorming (ADM) is een toepassing van AI die wordt gezien als bedreiging voor de rechtvaardigheid van beleid en bestuur, vooral omdat geauto‐ matiseerde besluitvorming vormen van reeds bestaande ongelijkheid in de samenleving versterkt. Echter, het kan ook gezien worden als kans om bestaande oneerlijkheid juist te beteugelen door het vermogen van AI om objectievere en dus meer rechtvaardig beslissingen te nemen. Op basis van recente literatuur uit verschillende domeinen binnen de sociale wetenschappen stellen we een kader voor dat kan helpen bij de ontwikkeling en de toepassing van AI binnen de publieke sector

Provocation: Technology, resistance and surveillance in public space

The introduction of technologies that monitor and track individuals to attribute suspicion and guilt has become commonplace in practices of order maintenance in public space. A case study of the introduction of a marker spray in Dutch urban public transport is used to conceptualise the role of technology in everyday resistances against surveillance. The introduction of this technology made available alternative subject positions. The notion of provocation is proposed for the opening up of social spaces by a technology. Through provocation, issues that do not find their expression in commonly accepted protocols and means of evidence are given a voice as a result of defiant, emotional and provisional technology usage. Attending to visible and defiant usages also opens up an agenda for examining the varying intensities at which technology operates

Phenotypic Studies of Natural Killer Cell Subsets in Human Transporter Associated with Antigen Processing Deficiency

Peripheral blood natural killer (NK) cells from patients with transporter associated with antigen processing (TAP) deficiency are hyporesponsive. The mechanism of this defect is unknown, but the phenotype of TAP-deficient NK cells is almost normal. However, we noticed a high percentage of CD56bright cells among total NK cells from two patients. We further investigated TAP-deficient NK cells in these patients and compared them to NK cells from two other TAP-deficient patients with no clinical symptoms and to individuals with chronic inflammatory diseases other than TAP deficiency (chronic lung diseases or vasculitis). Peripheral blood mononuclear cells isolated from venous blood were stained with fluorochrome-conjugated antibodies and the phenotype of NK cells was analyzed by flow cytometry. In addition, 51Chromium release assays were performed to assess the cytotoxic activity of NK cells. In the symptomatic patients, CD56bright NK cells represented 28% and 45%, respectively, of all NK cells (higher than in healthy donors). The patients also displayed a higher percentage of CD56dimCD16− NK cells than controls. Interestingly, this unusual NK cell subtype distribution was not found in the two asymptomatic TAP-deficient cases, but was instead present in several of the other patients. Over-expression of the inhibitory receptor CD94/NKG2A by TAP-deficient NK cells was confirmed and extended to the inhibitory receptor ILT2 (CD85j). These inhibitory receptors were not involved in regulating the cytotoxicity of TAP-deficient NK cells. We conclude that expansion of the CD56bright NK cell subtype in peripheral blood is not a hallmark of TAP deficiency, but can be found in other diseases as well. This might reflect a reaction of the immune system to pathologic conditions. It could be interesting to investigate the relative distribution of NK cell subsets in various respiratory and autoimmune diseases

Turning aggression into an object of intervention: Tinkering in a crime control pilot study

Real-world experiments that test new technologies can affect policy and practice by introducing new objects of intervention through tinkering; the ad hoc work of realigning relations in the face of frictions, surprises, and disturbances that occur when introducing a technology. In a pilot study on aggression detection, tinkering moved aggression in and out of the human body. In the end, the pilot defined aggression as a set of acoustic-physical variables representing the aroused human body, alongside other signals of aggression. How aggression as an object intervention was shaped by tinkering is relevant because it involved inclusions and exclusions by the authorities who identified aggression, the methods they applied, and mandate for intervention. A focus on relations that are tinkered within a real-world experiment permits critical engagement with this format. Although the real-world experimental format is credited with producing knowledge about a technology's ‘actual’ performance, actors and events at the pilot study location were made only selectively relevant. Analyses of real-world experiments should therefore explain how experiments selectively make the world relevant, giving only particular objects of intervention a truth status