No App is an Island: Collective Action and Sustainable Development Goal-Sensitive Design

The transformation to the Digital Society presents a challenge to engineer ever more complex socio-technical systems in order to address wicked societal problems. Therefore, it is essential that these systems should be engineered with respect not just to conventional functional and non-functional requirements, but also with respect to satisfying qualitative human values, and assessing their impact on global challenges, such as those expressed by the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). In this paper, we present a set of sets of design principles and an associated meta-platform, which focus design of socio-technical systems on the potential interaction of human and artificial intelligence with respect to three aspects: firstly, decision-support with respect to the codification of deep social knowledge; secondly, visualisation of community contribution to successful collective action; and thirdly, systemic improvement with respect to the SDGs through impact assessment and measurement. This methodology, of SDG-Sensitive Design, is illustrated through the design of two collective action apps, one for encouraging plastic re-use and reducing plastic waste, and the other for addressing redistribution of surplus food. However, as with the inter-connectedness of the SDGs, we conclude by arguing that the inter-connectedness of the Digital Society implies that system development cannot be undertaken in isolation from other systems

Values, axial currencies, and computational axiology: digital currencies can do more than buy stuff

Eleven to twelve thousand years ago, early humans lived in small communities with no discernible hierarchy. The "agrarian revolution" resulted in communities growing on such a scale that mechanisms of self-organization - e.g., for monitoring, keeping order, and ensuring a "satisfactory" allocation of resources - were no longer efficient or effective. However, the concurrent "cognitive" revolution resulted in the faculty of imagination, in particular, the imagination of rules, to solve such problems

A Noninvasive Brain-Computer Interface for Real-Time Speech Synthesis: The Importance of Multimodal Feedback.

We conducted a study of a motor imagery brain-computer interface (BCI) using electroencephalography to continuously control a formant frequency speech synthesizer with instantaneous auditory and visual feedback. Over a three-session training period, sixteen participants learned to control the BCI for production of three vowel sounds (/ textipa i/ [heed], / textipa A/ [hot], and / textipa u/ [who'd]) and were split into three groups: those receiving unimodal auditory feedback of synthesized speech, those receiving unimodal visual feedback of formant frequencies, and those receiving multimodal, audio-visual (AV) feedback. Audio feedback was provided by a formant frequency artificial speech synthesizer, and visual feedback was given as a 2-D cursor on a graphical representation of the plane defined by the first two formant frequencies. We found that combined AV feedback led to the greatest performance in terms of percent accuracy, distance to target, and movement time to target compared with either unimodal feedback of auditory or visual information. These results indicate that performance is enhanced when multimodal feedback is meaningful for the BCI task goals, rather than as a generic biofeedback signal of BCI progress

Socially-Sensitive Systems Design:Exploring Social Potential

In human society, individuals have long voluntarily organized themselves in groups, which embody, provide and/or facilitate a range of different social concepts, such as governance, justice, or mutual aid. These social groups vary in form, size, and permanence, but in different ways provide benefits to their members. In turn, members of these groups use their understanding and awareness of group expectations to help determine their own actions, to the benefit of themselves, each other, and the health of the group

Heaven and Hell: visions for pervasive adaptation

With everyday objects becoming increasingly smart and the “info-sphere” being enriched with nano-sensors and networked to computationally-enabled devices and services, the way we interact with our environment has changed significantly, and will continue to change rapidly in the next few years. Being user-centric, novel systems will tune their behaviour to individuals, taking into account users’ personal characteristics and preferences. But having a pervasive adaptive environment that understands and supports us “behaving naturally” with all its tempting charm and usability, may also bring latent risks, as we seamlessly give up our privacy (and also personal control) to a pervasive world of business-oriented goals of which we simply may be unaware

Compounding barriers to fairness in the digital technology ecosystem

A growing sense of unfairness permeates our quasi-digital society. Despite drivers supporting and motivating ethical practice in the digital technology ecosystem, there are compounding barriers to fairness that, at every level, impact technology innovation, delivery and access. Amongst these are barriers and omissions at the earliest stages of technology intentionality and design; systemic inadequacies in sensing systems that deteriorate performance for individuals based on ethnicity, age and physicality; system design, co-requisite and interface decisions that limit access; biases and inequities in datasets and algorithms; and limiting factors in system function and security. Additionally, there are concerns about unethical and illegal practices amongst digital technology providers: for example, in planned obsolescence and anti-competitive behaviors, failings in data practices and security, and in responses to problematic use and behaviors. It is critical that these failings are identified and addressed to better evolve a fairer future digital technology ecosystem. This paper contributes a perspective on technological stewardship and innovation; it identifies the compounding nature of barriers to fairness in the current digital technology ecosystem, and contrasts these with the non-compounding fairness drivers that, in general, establish minimum requirements