Matt Stempeck

Matt Stempeck

  • Thinking ethically about our relationships with social robots

    Liveblog of Kate Darling’s Berkman Center lunch, A discussion of near-term ethical, legal, and societal issues in robotics.

    Kate begins with the observation that there aren’t nearly enough experts in robotic law. Those that are interested in the emergent field need to become more expert, and many more need to join them in the pursuit.

    Here are some of the emerging issues:

    • Liability: the chain of causality of harm is going to get longer and more complex
    • Code is going to contain ethical decisions as autonomous units interact with their environments
    • People’s sensitivity to invasion of privacy is more strongly manifested when infractions are committed by robots (vs. NSA infrastructure-level scripts). Public aversion to such invasions may actually be an opportunity to push for stronger privacy rights.
    • Our tendency to project lifelike qualities on robotic objects. People bond with their cars, phones, stuffed animals, and virtual objects in video games. But this effect is stronger in robots.
    • Physicality: we react differently to objects in our physical space than things on a screen

    duckling

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  • Clay Shirky: Planning Shan’t Trump Reality

    Clay Shirky‘s on stage with Ginny Hunt at Harvard’s Institute of Politics discussing the lessons we can take away from the Healthcare.gov boondoggle (#netrevolution).

    Clay’s first point is that of all the criticism of Healthcare.gov and the Affordable Care Act, no one has argued that it’s a bad idea to rely on the web as the central component of citizen interaction with a government program. All of the other communications options, from phone to fax, have been considered second-rate fallback options. (more…)

  • Men Shouldn’t

    men need to

    A powerful new ad campaign for UN Women finds its copy in actual Google Autocomplete suggestions succeeding search queries like “Women shouldn’t” and “Women need to”. The results are misogynist, and even more so once you understand that their existence in Google Autocomplete is the result of those phrases appearing in relatively high volumes of actual searches:

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  • Comedy Hack Day Demos at MIT Media Lab

    Cultivated Wit Comedy Hack DayComedy Hack Day began when Craig realized he had two independent groups of nerdy friends: comedy nerds and computer nerds. Comedy Hack Day brings these two groups together.

    The first event was held in NYC September 2012. The second was held at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco in April 2013 (watch highlight reel). This weekend, we infested the MIT Media Lab.

    group shot

    Here are the final demos:

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  • Beauty vs. Usability = Both

    Like many users before me, I stared at my rat’s nest of Delicious bookmark tags one day and realized the futility of tagging all these links with words and phrases I’d never actually recall. At that point, I gave up on taxonomy and tried a new tactic: filing bookmarks into only two folders: Beautiful and Useful.

    The beautiful examples were inspiring, artistic, and aesthetically gorgeous. The useful examples offered new functionalities, potential savings of time, and clever solutions.

     

    Beauty vs. Utility
    Beauty vs. Utility

    This dichotomy approach failed, too, as I realized that there’s a sometimes complicated interplay between beauty and utility.

    Javier Bargas-Avila, user experience researcher at Google and YouTube, is at the Harvard Berkman Center today (video) to share his psychological research on this interplay in user experience. (more…)

  • How do you make research more accessible?

    One of my pet peeves in life is how rarely serious research is shared with lay audiences. There are many reasons for this, like overbearing publisher copyright policies and overburdened researcher duties, but I’m curious about creative solutions. What ideas do you have?

    the YPP logoThis month, I’ve had the ridiculous opportunity to sit and read through the Youth & Participatory Politics corpus of research. YPP is part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. They study how young people use new media to become more civically and politically engaged people, and how online expression can become structural political impact. There are other deliverables, but I also want to use this opportunity to distribute and prepare this work for a broader audience.

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  • “This Is Not Spam” reports

    Not spam button in Gmail

    Gmail routinely sends email updates from social organizations to the spam folder. For the organizations I like, I’ll occasionally go in and rescue them by pressing the “Not spam” button. It turns out that this user feedback does actually help improve that organization’s overall deliverability. I wrote up some tips on staying out of the spam folder for an NOI Tip of the Day.

  • Characterizing the Life Cycle of Online News Stories Using Social Media Reactions

    I’ve graduated, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting to see my first academic paper accepted for publication. Thanks to Carlos Castillo, Mohammed El-Haddad, and Jürgen Pfeffer for driving this paper, and for inviting me to collaborate. Take a look. Al Jazeera English provided us with some great data.

    To appear in Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Baltimore, USA. February 2014.

    [Download PDF]

    The shelf-life of hard news vs feature pieces
    The shelf-life of hard news vs feature pieces on Al Jazeera English

    Abstract:
    This paper presents a study of the life cycle of news articles posted online. We describe the interplay between website visitation patterns and social media reactions to the news content. We show that we can use this hybrid observation method to characterize distinct classes of articles. We also find that social media reactions can be used to predict future visitation patterns early and accurately.

    We validate our methods using qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis on data from a large international news network, for a set of articles generating more than 3,000,000 visits and 200,000 social media reactions. We show that it is possible to model accurately the overall traffic articles will ultimately receive by observing the first ten to twenty minutes of social media reactions. Achieving the same prediction accuracy with visits alone would require to wait for three hours of data. We also describe significant improvements on the accuracy of the early prediction of shelf-life for news stories.

  • How the Pros Liveblog

    Around this time last year, I wrote up the Center for Civic Media’s approach to liveblogging. I recently got to interview editors at The Verge and Polygon and learn how they cover huge live events like WWDC and E3 (spoiler: way more professionally).

  • The Verge, Polygon, and modern media companies

    I’ve got a new piece up over at PBS: Inside Vox Media’s Attempt to Build a Modern Media Stack

  • Killing People Still Morally Wrong

    My late night reaction to the Trayvon Martin judgement, cross-posted from Civic.

    These are the moments that make the other moments of attempted unity more difficult, more hollow, for many among us. Before giving into the polarized reactions that the Trayvon Martin story has elicited from its onset, we might practice a little empathy for those for whom the case represented a great deal more than George Zimmerman’s fate.

    My thoughts race tonight to the family of Trayvon Martin, who fought so hard through personal emotions and the initially indifferent public reaction to deliver attention (and by extension, they hoped, justice) to their loss. But tonight especially, my feelings go out to everyone for whom this judgement is just vindication of the existing fear and trepidation we force them to feel for simply existing as they were born.

    The spotlight cast onto Trayvon’s story has provided brief illumination to the countless similar stories of innocent people gunned down by other people whose brains boiled over in a combustion of long-brewing bias and all-too-ready access to a trigger. And that’s what guns remain to some unacceptably high percentage of Americans: a mechanism of protection against our fellow citizens, particularly those who for some time, weren’t fellow citizens at all. Stand Your Ground laws, backed by the most reactionary elements of our society, have rewritten our most basic and longstanding rule — murder is wrong — to protect those who murder as a result of their own fear.

  • Make an Internet Time Capsule with Google Chrome

    Make an Internet Time Capsule with Google Chrome

    If you use the Chrome browser, you may have noticed that when you begin typing in the address bar, Google’s Autocomplete prediction service guesses where you might be heading to save you keystrokes. If you have Web History enabled, those guesses aren’t just popular websites, but rather the sites you’re historically most likely to visit.

    I realized that this list of sites actually end up serving as a sort of internet time capsule of the last ten weeks (the amount of time the browser history spans). So, here are my Internet ABCs of my last three months of grad school at the Media Lab. Click any of the images to go to the site.

    A is for Analytics
    is for Analytics. I maintain a lot of websites

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