Cost-effective learning for classifying human values

You are viewing a publication by UT affiliates from the May 2020 Good System Network Digest.Office of the VP for Researc

Good Systems Responds to the COVID-19 Crisis

You are viewing an article from The Medium that was published in 2020 about Good Systems.Office of the VP for Researc

1 Modeling Diverse Standpoints in Text Classification: Learning to Be Human by Modeling Human Values

An annotator’s classification of a text not only tells us something about the intent of the text’s author, it also tells us something about the annotator’s standpoint. To understand authorial intent, we can consider all of these diverse standpoints, as well as the extent to which the annotators ’ standpoints affect their perceptions of authorial intent. To model human behavior, it is important to model humans ’ unique standpoints. Human values play an especially important role in determining human behavior and how people perceive the world around them, so any effort to model human behavior and perception can benefit from an effort to understand and model human values. Instead of training humans to obscure their standpoints and act like computers, we should teach computers to have standpoints of their own

Building an IT Taxonomy with Co-occurrence Analysis, Hierarchical Clustering, and Multidimensional Scaling

Different information technologies (ITs) are related in complex ways. How can the relationships among a large number of ITs be described and analyzed in a representative, dynamic, and scalable way? In this study, we employed co-occurrence analysis to explore the relationships among 50 information technologies discussed in six magazines over ten years (1998-2007). Using hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling, we have found that the similarities of the technologies can be depicted in hierarchies and two-dimensional plots, and that similar technologies can be classified into meaningful categories. The results imply reasonable validity of our approach for understanding technology relationships and building an IT taxonomy. The methodology that we offer not only helps IT practitioners and researchers make sense of numerous technologies in the iField but also bridges two related but thus far largely separate research streams in iSchools - information management and IT management

Information Ethics Education for a Multicultural World

How can we prepare information systems students to face the ethical challenges of a globalized world? This paper describes a three-step approach for addressing these challenges. First, we have designed undergraduate and graduate information ethics courses that expand the range of learning of ethical theories beyond the traditional Western canon to include a wide spectrum of non-Western and feminist theories. Second, we have designed interactive cases for this course that adopt a collaborative learning approach where students work together in small groups by playing different roles that make interdependent decisions. Third, we deliver these cases via an educational simulation, making the approach scalable and transferable to other institutions across the country and around the world. The data for this study includes textual answers from end-of-semester questionnaires completed by 101 undergraduate and graduate students during four information ethics courses that included use of the simulation. Data was analyzed using thematic analysis, focusing on the multicultural and global dimensions of student learning. Five themes emerged from data collected in the four courses: Learning about a Diverse Range of Ethical Theories; Learning about how Ethical Theories are Related to Culture and Values; Relating International and Multicultural Dimensions to Understanding Oneself; Relating International and Multicultural Dimensions to Understanding Others; and Understanding the Role of Ethics and Culture in Information Systems Design and Use. Based on these results, the three-step approach developed in this study can be implemented across the country and around the world to ensure that students are prepared for the ethical challenges of a globalized world

Cost-effective learning for classifying human values

Prior work has found that classifier accuracy can be improved early in the process by having each annotator label different documents, but that later in the process it becomes better to rely on a more expensive multiple-annotation process in which annotators subsequently meet to adjudicate their differences. This paper reports on a study with a large number of classification tasks, finding that the relative advantage of adjudicated annotations varies not just with training data quantity, but also with annotator agreement, class imbalance, and perceived task difficulty

Understanding IT Innovations Through Computational Analysis of Discourse

How do Information Technology (IT) innovation concepts emerge, coexist, evolve, and relate to each other? To address this question, we theorize that innovation concepts are interrelated in an idea network, where they can be likened to species in a competitive and symbiotic resource space. Communities of organizations and people interested in the innovations produce discourse that both reflects and enables the flows of attention among innovations. From this ecological perspective, we apply discourse analysis to innovation research and propose computational approach to scale up the analysis. Specifically, we employed Kullback-Leibler divergence to compare the linguistic patterns of 48 IT innovations reported in InformationWeek and Computerworld over a decade. Using multidimensional scaling, we found that similar innovations demonstrated similar discourses. The results demonstrate the validity, scalability, and utility of computational discourse analysis for practitioners and scholars to understand the socio-technical dynamics in the IT innovation ecosystem

Values as Generative Forces in Design

Abstract How do values inspire, energize, and politicize the design process? In turn, how does the process of design influence and inform our understanding of values? This workshop will explore the relationships between and amongst values, design, and creativity through a series of interactive activities, creative inquiry into the varied roles of values in the design process and design in the process of understanding values.ye

ASIS&T Webinar and Discussion: The Role of Information During a Global Health Crisis - Association for Information Science and Technology

You're viewing a past blog from the Good Systems Grand Challenge team at The University of Texas at Austin about free webinars offered to discuss the current and future effects of global crisis.Office of the VP for Researc

Global health crises are also information crises: A call to action

Association for Information Science & Technology published a piece from Bo Xie and others about the Misinformation/disinformation particularly during global health crises on March 13, 2020.Office of the VP for Researc