We are pleased to announce that UnBias won one of the three 2017 RCUK Digital Economy Theme ‘Telling Tales of Engagement’ awards. The evaluation process for this award considered both the impact of our previous work and a proposed new activity to “tell the story” of our research.
Our submission was titled “building and engaging with multi-stakeholder panels for developing policy recommendations”, highlighting the importance to our research of engaging with our stakeholder panel and with organizations that are shaping the policy and governance space for algorithmic systems.
The proposed new activity for “telling the story” of our research was inspired by the innovative approach with which Prof. Matt Daniels is using video clips with material from popular films and computer games, and crated by students, to raise awareness of Human Rights. In order to reach a broader and hopefully international audience of young people we will work with Prof. Daniels to create similar videos to highlight the intersection of Human Rights and accountability in algorithmic decision making, sources of algorithmic bias/discrimination and critical engagement/evaluation of algorithmically recommended content. An example being the video based on Captain America – Winter Soldier where (at time-stamp 3:04) they discuss how algorithmic systems use digital records to make increasing detailed predictions about people, that can be used to against them. In addition to creating and disseminating such videos, we also intend to explore how to evaluate the impact that creating and/or watching the videos has on peoples’ awareness of human rights related content in public media.
On May 26th we were please to host Prof. Daniels for a full day of discussions and planning in order to make this proposal a reality. Based on these discussions we agreed to two-stage approach:
Study 1:
· To take place at the start of December 2018
· Participants to complete a pre-questionnaire, then watch (a number of) privacy videos at https://righttoprivacy.org/, with the instruction to press a button whenever they hear something interesting, then complete a post-questionnaire.
· Carry out a follow up (questionnaire/interview) a month later to see what (if any) impact watching the video has had on the user/any behaviour changes/increased awareness of privacy related issues.
Study 2:
· To take place early 2019
· Participants to take part in a number of workshops where they are able to identify a privacy issue arising from algorithmic systems in a film or game. They will then pitch an idea, and once it is approved they will write a script using a template supplied by Prof. Daniels. Matt and his team will then read the script closely to check that it is legally and historically accurate, and suggest alterations if required.
· Once the script is approved, the students will use simple video editing and audio recording tools to create a new video clip highlighting the algorithmic-privacy issue.
The best videos will be rewarded with prizes and all resulting videos that are of sufficient quality will be uploaded and hosted on the Human Rights Network YouTube channel (which has more than 21k followers) as well as the UnBias project website. The videos will also become part of the discussion prompts for future ReEnTrust (UnBias follow-up project) activites. In this context they will also be included in the Youth Juries material provided on the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute’s Open Educational Resources website, which provides supporting materials for teachers, and others, who want to run similar Youth Juries activities on their own.
More information about our “Telling Tales of Engagement” story can be found at the new project page for this award.
