I’ve jumped on the bandwagon. At the moment everybody’s talking about how developments in artificial intelligence are going to affect the labour market, with researchers, policy-makers, businesses, and tech companies clamouring to figure out how the world of work is going to change in the upcoming decades because of AI. Last year I worked on
Happy birthday Hackers! First released on 15th September 1995, this classic cheesefest holds a special place in my heart. The first time I watched it was with my brother and we bonded over its ridiculous techno-babble and phenomenal outfits. Years later I would get to watch the film in a packed tent at UK hacker
Hack_Curio is an online collection of video clips and essays about hackers, put together by a team of academics who study hacker culture. After seeing a talk by two of the project’s founders at 36c3, I offered to write an entry about the Chaos Communication Congress itself based on the documentary “All Creatures Welcome” by Sandra Trostel. Check it out here.
Universities are shifting en masse to solutions like Zoom or Microsoft Teams to manage remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is vital that classrooms do not become spaces for data extraction. I’m part of a collective called Zoom Out that’s pushing universities to adopt in-house open source solutions. You can read our manifesto, and an overview of Zoom’s privacy and security violations, on Medium.
I spent yesterday up at the University of Sussex at a free symposium hosted by the Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology (FACT///.) research network. Despite being one of my local universities I don’t make it up to campus nearly often enough, so it was great to meet some of the researchers based at the Sussex
Last week I was at the 35th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig to talk on a panel about building inclusive hacker and maker communities. The Congress is organised annually by Europe’s largest hacker association, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), and is the continent’s oldest and largest hacker convention. This year it hosted 16,000 visitors who
This year was my second visit to Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s hacker camping festival, and by a weird twist of fate this year’s camp was held at the former site of a music festival I used to work at around 10 years ago. The new site was a lot bigger than its former location in
This April, Kat Braybrooke and I gathered 28 brave souls to explore algorithmic ghosts in Brighton — a city known for its blending of new-age spiritualities and digital medias, but perhaps not yet for its ghosts — through the launch of a new psychogeography tour for the Haunted Random Forest festival. Check out our write up on the Furtherfield blog.
When I tell people about my PhD—that I research ways to make technology more engaging for women—I usually brace myself for a reply like this: “Why would you bother to do that? Everyone knows men are just better at technology. It’s science!” It happens more often than you would think, and more often than I’d
A key problem created by gender imbalances in the tech and engineering industries is that it means fewer women than men have access to the means of designing and producing technological artefacts. If most programmers and engineers are men, then most software and hardware is going to be designed by men. As the sociologist Judy