Ethical Analysis on the Application of Neurotechnology for Human Augmentation in Physicians and Surgeons

With the shortage of physicians and surgeons and increase in demand worldwide due to situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing interest in finding solutions to help address the problem. A solution to this problem would be to use neurotechnology to provide them augmented cognition, senses and action for optimal diagnosis and treatment. Consequently, doing so can negatively impact them and others. We argue that applying neurotechnology for human enhancement in physicians and surgeons can cause injustices, and harm to them and patients. In this paper, we will first describe the augmentations and neurotechnologies that can be used to achieve the relevant augmentations for physicians and surgeons. We will then review selected ethical concerns discussed within literature, discuss the neuroengineering behind using neurotechnology for augmentation purposes, then conclude with an analysis on outcomes and ethical issues of implementing human augmentation via neurotechnology in medical and surgical practice

Privacy Vulnerabilities in the Practices of Repairing Broken Digital Artifacts in Bangladesh

This paper presents a study on the privacy concerns associated with the practice of repairing broken digital objects in Bangladesh. Historically, repair of old or broken technologies has received less attention in ICTD scholarship than design, development, or use. As a result, the potential privacy risks associated with repair practices have remained mostly unaddressed. This paper describes our three-month long ethnographic study that took place at ten major repair sites in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We show a variety of ways in which the privacy of an individual’s personal data may be compromised during the repair process. We also examine people’s perceptions around privacy in repair, and its connections with their broader social and cultural values. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for future research to strengthen the repair ecosystem in developing countries. Taken together, our findings contribute to the growing discourse around post-use cycles of technology

Towards Automated Sexual Violence Report Tracking

Tracking sexual violence is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a supervised learning-based automated sexual violence report tracking model that is more scalable, and reliable than its crowdsource based counterparts. We define the sexual violence report tracking problem by considering victim, perpetrator contexts and the nature of the violence. We find that our model could identify sexual violence reports with a precision and recall of 80.4% and 83.4%, respectively. Moreover, we also applied the model during and after the \#MeToo movement. Several interesting findings are discovered which are not easily identifiable from a shallow analysis

Values in Repair

This paper examines the question of “values in repair” – the distinct forms of meaning and care that may be built into human-technology interactions through individual and collective acts of repair. Our work draws on research in HCI and the social sciences and findings from ethnographic studies in four sites — two amateur “fixers’ collectives” in Brooklyn and Seattle, USA and two mobile phone repair communities in Uganda and Bangladesh — to advance two arguments. First, studies of repair account for new sites and processes of value that differ from those appearing at HCI’s better-studied moments of design and use. Second, repair may embed modes of human interaction with technology and with each other in ways that surface values as contingent and ongoing accomplishments, suggesting ongoing processes of valuation that can never be fully fixed or commoditized. These insights help HCI account for human relationships to technology built into the world through repair