Events

Joint event with the Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin Via WebEx | The panel is part of the Symposium on Innovation and Competition in the Digital Economy jointly organized by Prof. Johannes M. Bauer, Quello Center at Michigan State University, and Dr. Volker Stocker, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. The event will provide a stimulating venue for researchers from multiple fields, including economics/management and law, to discuss their work and perspectives on the roles of big tech for innovation and competition in the digital economy. Specifically, we would like to discuss the impact of big tech companies on competition and their […]

Join us in person, Communication Arts & Sciences Room 191 (South entrance) or via Zoom (sign up here). Event is Sponsored by the Rural Computing Research Consortium, Quello Center, American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering Rural places have experienced pernicious digital inequities for decades. Recent Pew Survey data finds that 28% of rural households in the US do not have broadband Internet access. For years, solutions to this digital divide have involved trillions of dollars invested into infrastructure that never quite bridges the gap. Instead of playing a perpetual game of technology […]

Via Zoom | So many of the debates about public policy and the digital economy revolve around issues that are social-cybernetic in nature. That is, they deal with control and communication, but not “in the animal and the machine,” as Norbert Wiener’s foundational definition of cybernetics would have it, but control and communication in social systems. AI applications are accused of reinforcing societal biases by replicating patterns that reflect past discriminatory decisions. We want to know how much of our social life can be automated or turned over to robots, and whether this increases or decreases our sense of control […]