Category Archives: Events

Ciclo de charlas en Chile sobre inteligencia artificial, trabajo y redes sociales

Estoy muy emocionada y feliz de empezar un ciclo de charlas en Chile, principalmente en Santiago y Talca, con Antonio A. Casilli este mes de enero. Agradezco mucho a la Embajada de Francia en Chile, al Instituto Francés de Chile, y a la Fundación Teatro a Mil por esta oportunidad maravillosa. Gracias también a Juana Torres Cierpe y a Francisca Ortiz Ruiz por su ayuda en contactar con colegas, amigos y estudiantes de Chile.

Empezaremos por una charla titulada “Plataformas digitales, trabajo en línea y automatización tras la crisis sanitaria”, que tendrá lugar el día lunes 16 de enero a las 12:00 hrs en la sede de la CUT (1 oriente # 809, Talca). En esta charla presentaremos nuestras investigaciones sobre el fenómeno del micro-trabajo fuertemente precarizado que se desarrolla en las plataformas digitales. Agradezco mucho a la profesora Claudia Jordana Contreras y a la Escuela de Sociología de la Universidad Católica del Maule por la organización de este evento.

El martes 17 enero 2023, 11:00, hablaré de “Inteligencia artificial, transformaciones laborales y desigualdades: El trabajo de las mujeres en las plataformas digitales de ‘microtareas” en el Instituto de Sociología de la Universidad Católica y con el Quantitative and Computational Social Science Research Group. Gracias a Mauricio Bucca que ha organizado este evento. Estaremos en la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Campus San Joaquín.

El martes 17 por la tarde (a las 17:000 hrs), hablaré de “Ética de la inteligencia artificial y otros desafíos para la investigación sobre redes sociales” como parte de la Escuela de Verano del Centro de Investigación en Complejidad Social, Universidad del Desarrollo. Agradezco a Jorge Fábrega Lacoa y sus colegas para la organización.

El martes 17 a las 10:000 hrs, también habrá una ponencia de Antonio Casilli en el evento Congreso Futuro: “Trabajo global y inteligencia artificial. Los ‘ingredientes humanos’ ed la automatización” (Teatro Oriente, Pedro de Valdivia 099, Providencia).

El viernes 20 de enero 2023, a las 10:00 hrs, Antonio y yo hablaremos juntos de “El trabajo detrás de la inteligencia artificial y la automatización en América Latina” en un taller internacional organizado por la Universidad de Chile – con Pablo Pérez (gracias por la organización!) y Francisca Gutiérrez, sala 129, FASCO, Av. Ignacio Carrera Pinto 1045, Ñuñoa.

Sigue un evento organizado por el Instituto Francés, “La noche de las ideas”:

Viernes 20 enero 2023, 20:00 hrs, Centro cultural La Moneda, Noche de las Ideas, Santiago — Paola Tubaro “Automatización: ¿El fin del humano?” (con con Denis Parra y Javier Ibacache, Plaza de la Ciudadanía 26, Santiago).

Sabado 21 enero 2021, 16:00 hrs, Centro cultural La Moneda, Noche de las Ideas, Santiago — Antonio Casilli “¿Qué esconde la inteligencia artificial?” (con José Ulloa, Constanza Michelson y Paula Escobar, Plaza de la Ciudadanía 26, Santiago).

El miércoles 26 de enero 2023, a las 18:30 hrs en Santiago, habrá la presentación del libro de Antonio Casilli, “Esperando a los robots. Investigación sobre el trabajo del clic” (LOM, 2021) (con Paulo Slachevsky, Librería del Ulises Lastarria, José Victorino Lastarria 70, local 2, Paseo Barrio Lastarria).

Todos los eventos son gratuitos. Para la Noche de las Ideas y el Congreso Futuro, es necesario inscribirse online.

Networks in the digital organization

This week, I was pleased and honoured to give a keynote speech at wonderful EUSN2021 (European Social Networks 2021) conference. The event was originally planned in beautiful Naples, but was unfortunately moved online because of pandemic-induced uncertainties.

In my talk, I endeavoured to reconcile the tradition of research on social and organizational network analysis – in which I have been trained, and which constitutes the specialism of most participants to EUSN conferences – with the nascent literature on digital platform labour. Indeed, organizational network studies have shaped my (and many other colleagues’) understanding of how social ties and structures drive collective action and shape its outcomes. However, contemporary computing technologies breed novel sociabilities and organizational modes that disrupt established practices and knowledge. In particular, the emergence of digital platforms as market intermediaries constitutes a puzzle for network researchers. These emerging organizational structures loosen individual-organization links, fragment production processes, individualize sub-contracting, extend competition beyond the local level, and threaten jobs with AI-fuelled automation. My question then is: in these environments where isolation dominates and collaboration fades, how do social networks operate, if at all? And how can we, as researchers, apprehend them?

In my talk, I discussed how digital platforms, and the transformations of work processes they trigger, challenge some of the key tenets of organizational network analysis. Yet there is still much to learn from this tradition, and the limited overlaps with the nascent literature on platforms reveal facets that neither of them, alone, could capture. This analysis also confirms that overall, technology-enabled platform intermediation restrains sociability and limits interactions, but specific cases where networking has been possible highlight the fundamental advantages it brings to workers.

On this basis, I outlined directions for future research and policy action.

Many thanks to the organizers who still did a wonderful job despite the online-only mode, and to all attendees for inspiring questions and feedback.

Unboxing AI conference

I’m excited to be part of the organizing team for an upcoming conference entitled “Unboxing AI” and aiming to open – at least to an extent – the black box. What are the material conditions of AI production? Who are the multitudes of precarious workers who contribute to it in the shadow, by generating data and checking algorithmic outputs? What are the geographical areas and the social scope of the work that produces today’s intelligent technologies? These are some of the questions we aim to explore.

The first two days of the conference (November 5 and 6, 3pm – 7pm CET) will bring together highly regarded international specialists from a wide variety of disciplines (sociology, law, economics, but also the arts and humanities…). On the third day (November 7, also 3 pm – 7 pm CET), there will be a doctoral colloquium with a selection of very promising work by young researchers.

The conference was initially planned to take place in Milan in March 2020, and had to be postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As the health situation is still critical, we have opted for an online-only version. At least, this format is cheap – no need to travel to attend – and we can welcome a more geographically diverse range of participants. Indeed the afternoon-only schedule is meant to enable colleagues from North and South America to attend.

Participation is free of charge but prior registration is required. You will find the programme as well as registration forms here
(please note that there is a separate form for each of the three dates of the conference).

The conference is organized as part of the initiatives of our ‘International Network on Digital Labor‘ and is co-sponsored by ISRF (Independent Social Research Foundation), the Nexa Center for Internet and Society, and Fondazione Feltrinelli.

Work, Employment & Society

BSA_WES2018Just came back from the Work, Employment and Society (WES) conference 2018, that British Sociological Association (BSA) organizes every other year. Perhaps more intimate and newbie-friendly than the main BSA event, this year’s WES in Belfast was also a positive surprise in terms of its academic content. There were several sessions on the so-called ‘gig economy’ (or as one speaker put it, ‘gig economies‘), the effects of digital business models that often go under the name of ‘uberization’, and atypical forms of work.

Some lessons I am taking home:

  • A growing number of researchers are studying platform work – not just the most visible forms of it such as Uber drivers and Deliveroo couriers, but also those who are hidden at home: freelancers and to a lesser extent, micro-workers;
  • The question of how platform workers self-organize, and what can be done to improve their organization capacity, is attracting a lot of attention;
  • Efforts at establishing standards, fairness criteria and forms of social protection for atypical platform workers are gaining momentum;
  • There is a lot we can learn from research in neighboring areas: for example the distinction between employee-friendly and employer-friendly flexible work, initially developed for people in employment, is also helpful here.

What is still missing from the picture is information on the ‘long tail’ of smaller, often national rather than international, platforms, and on the workers (especially micro-workers) who use them. Besides, clients and requesters are little known – on all platforms. Estimating the size of the platform worker population remains an unresolved issue – whether at local, national or international level. A common grievance by researchers is difficulty to access crucial data from commercial platforms that use them as their private property.

More than complex: large and rich network structures

I co-organize this Satellite to the NETSCI2018 Conference in Paris, 12 June 2018. We are now accepting submissions of proposals for presentations.

Information on the Satellite

In traditional research paradigms, sociology handles small but rich networks where the richness of network attributes is derived from the specific buildup of the data collection process. In the sociological approach, differences among nodes and edges are key to describe network properties and the ensuing dynamical social processes. Instead, the complex systems tradition deals with large but poor networks. Assuming statistical equivalence of graph entities, a mean field treatment serves to describe the aggregate properties of the network. Today’s network datasets contain an unprecedented quantity of relational information at all, and between all, the possible levels: individuals, social groups, political structures, economical actors, etc. We finally deal with large and rich network structures that expose the implicit limitations of the two abovementioned approaches: the traditional methods from social science cannot be upscaled because of their algorithmic complexity and those from complex systems lose track of the complex nature of the actors, their relationships and their processes. This workshop has the aim of developing an interdisciplinary reflection on how methods from social science could be upscaled to large network structures and on how methods from complex systems could be downscaled to deal with small heterogeneous structures.

We are proud that five prominent international scholars are our invited speakers: Camille Roth, SciencesPo Paris; Matthieu Latapy, LIP6UPMC Paris; Alessandro Lomi, ETH Zurich; Fariba Karimi, GESIS Cologne; Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University.

Contributions

We invite abstracts of published or unpublished work for contributed talks to take place at the satellite symposium. We expect a broad range of topics to be covered, across theory, methodology, and application to empirical data, relating to an interdisciplinary reflection on how methods from social science could be upscaled to large network structures and on how methods from complex systems could be downscaled to deal with small heterogeneous structures.

Submission can be made through our website.

Submissions are required to be at most 650 words long and should include the following information: title of the talk, author(s), affiliation(s), email address(es), name of the presenter, abstract. Papers or submissions longer than 1 page will not be accepted.

Important dates

Abstract submission deadline is March 25, 2018. Notification of acceptance will be no later than April 23, 2018.

All participants and accepted speakers will have to register through the NETSCI2018 website.

Sharing Networks BCN 2017

Did you attend the OuiShare Fest Barcelona 2017? If you did, and were not interviewed by a member of our team there, please take our survey online!

With a group of colleagues from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and in Collaboration with OuiShare, we are studying networking at the event. The OuiShare Fest aims, among other things, to bring people together: we want to see how interactions between participants facilitate circulation of ideas and possibly give rise to future collaborations.

We did the same study at the OuiShare Fest Paris 2016 and 2017.

For more details, see here.

SPS seminar, second edition

Our inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional SPS seminar (Paris Seminar on the Analysis of Social Processes and Structures) has just started its second edition! Its purpose is to take stock of the debates within the international scientific community that have repercussions on the practice of contemporary sociology, and that renew the ways in which we construct research designs, i.e., the ways in which we connect theoretical claims, data collection and methods to assess the link between data and theory. Several observations motivate this endeavor. Increasing interactions between social sciences and disciplines such as computer science, physics and biology outline new conceptual and methodological perspectives on social realities. The availability of massive data sets raises the question of the tools required to describe, visualize and model these data sets. Simulation techniques, experimental methods and counterfactual analyses modify our conceptions of causality. Crossing sociology’s disciplinary frontiers, network analysis expands its range of scales. In addition, the development of mixed methods redraws the distinction between qualitative and quantitative approaches. In light of these challenges, the SPS seminar discusses studies that, irrespective of their subject and disciplinary background, provide the opportunity to deepen our understanding of the relations between theory, data and methods in social sciences.

Continue reading “SPS seminar, second edition”

Recent ethical challenges in social network analysis (RECSNA17)

Research on social networks is experiencing unprecedented growth, fuelled by the consolidation of network science and the increasing availability of data from digital networking platforms. However, it raises formidable ethical issues that often fall outside existing regulations and guidelines. New tools to collect, treat, store personal data expose both researchers and participants to specific risks. Political use and business capture of scientific results transcend standard research concerns. Legal and social ramifications of studies on personal ties and human networks surface.

We invite contributions from researchers in the social sciences, economics, management, statistics, computer science, law and philosophy, as well as other stakeholders to advance the ethical reflection in the face of new research challenges.

The workshop will take place on 5 December 2017 (full day) at MSH Paris-Saclay, with open keynote sessions to be held on 6 December 2017 (morning) at Hôtel de Lauzun, a 17th century palace in the heart of historic Île de la Cité.

Calendar:

  • Submit a 300-word abstract by 15 October 2017.
  • Let us know if you wish to be panel discussant or session chair by 20 October 2017 (send to: recsna17@msh-paris-saclay.fr).
  • Acceptance notifications will be sent by 31 October 2017.
  • Registration is free but mandatory: speakers (and discussants and chairs) should register between 15 October and 15 November 2017, other attendees by 30 November 2017.

Keynote Speakers

José Luis Molina, Autonomous University of Barcelona, “HyperEthics: A Critical Account”
Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute, “Privatising the personal network: Ethical challenges for social network site research”

Scientific Committee

Antonio A. Casilli (Telecom ParisTech, FR), Alessio D’Angelo (Middlesex University, UK), Guillaume Favre (University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, FR), Bernie Hogan (Oxford Internet Institute, UK), Elise Penalva-Icher (University of Paris Dauphine, FR), Louise Ryan (University of Sheffield, UK), Paola Tubaro (CNRS, FR).

Contact us

Email: recsna17@msh-paris-saclay.fr
Webpage: http://recsna17.sciencesconf.org
Twitter: @recsna17