Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been met by unequal responses in different countries and led to unequal impacts to Europe, USA, Asia, and Latin America. The pandemic has made unequal internet access both within and between countries. At the same time, new opportunities also emerge and the Web changes dramatically. The purpose of this panel is to discuss the future of the Web in a post-COVID world.

– What is the current situation of the Web compared to the situation before 2020?
– What has shifted in the web area and have we reached the “new normal?”
– What data security implications on the Web should we be concerned about?

Abstract

As the pandemic keeps influencing our everyday lives, researchers assemble valuable datasets that can help to better understand the impact COVID-19 has on society. This includes both data from the Web or other digital platforms, as well as data about Web usage and information flows. And while the current focus is naturally on understanding the immediate effects of the pandemic to improve the situation as it unfolds, we also encourage thinking about its impact on the future and asking how to remember and pass on the lessons learned. The panel features experts from different research fields to contribute their unique data and perspectives. Together we are aiming to address topics such as mobility and (dis)information, and to shed light on different national perspectives on COVID-19 responses.

Notes

In 2016, an MIT Graduate student gave a TEDx Talk in New York.  Joy Buolamwini’s  How I am fighting Algorithmic Bias, has been viewed by nearly 1.5 million people, and it later led to a journey of deeper discovery with other researchers and filmmaker Shalini Kantayya. Their resulting film, Coded Bias, was launched at the Sundance Festival in 2020 and later released on Netflix in April 2021. The film reveals in an accessible way how facial recognition software and automated decision-making has unprecedented power to reproduce bias at scale. As companies and governments increasingly outsource their services to entities which employ more machines and more machine learning , we can now see that algorithms are being used to decide what information we see, who gets hired, who gets health care, and who gets undue police scrutiny. Human rights lawyers and ethicists can see that this affects vulnerable communities the hardest.

Our distinguished panellists will bring Joy’s insights right up to date and will chart how fast the field is moving whilst also digging deep into the origins of this field. What steps can and should be taken by companies, individual people and researchers to change the way in which ordinary human bias and ignorance is encoded into our digitally driven world? How will we help enable machines not to make the same mistakes as we have historically made? Do we understand the concept of ethics in private and public companies well enough, let alone AI ethics? Do private companies have the same responsibilities as public and government institutions when it comes to transparency and accountability? Environmental, Social and Governance (ESGs) are all the rage but are they becoming a branch of marketing?

Notes

As a place for organizing and the emergence of new organizations, the Web is a platform that has been evolving for more than 25 years. Digital data from the Web provides a rich platform for observing a wide range of social science phenomena – especially patterns of organizational activity. Simultaneously, Web Science has emphasized the intersection of disciplines as a way to understand the science of the Web, but it is equally important to theorize how we connect levels of activity on the Web (from individuals to organizations to ecosystems and governments). Building off a foundation grounded in institutional theory and the emergence of institutions, this talk outlines a multilevel perspective of institutions on the Web as a means of understanding the various processes by which organizational activity occurs. New approaches to data collection and analysis are discussed in order to enable a multilevel and longitudinal analysis of Web-based activity.