In a recent essay published in Media International Australia, Professor Julian Thomas reflects on the substantial and diverse contributions of ADM+S Board member, Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham to ‘reframing culture’ in Australian research, policy and industry practice from early reformulations of Australian film history to his recent work on digital media disruption.

“One of Cunningham’s distinctive qualities was his interest in not only studying institutions and policies, but also in working with others to make them and shape them” writes Professor Thomas.

The ARC Centre for Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) and Humanitech, an initiative of the Australian Red Cross dedicated to harnessing emerging technologies for the benefit of humanity, have launched the Technology for Society online series which presents the best minds on the forefront of technological and social innovation. The series highlights the critical issues at the intersection of humanity and evolving technologies with discussions between academia, industry, and humanitarian organisations.

The series launched on 30 November 2021 with a conversation between Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas (ADM+S Centre Director), Amanda Robinson (Co-Founder and Director of Humanitech), and Ivana Jurko (Co-founder and Evidence and Influence Lead at Humanitech, and Partner Investigator at the ADM+S Centre) exploring the creation of the ADM+S Centre/Humanitech partnership, the initiatives the partnership has enabled and the value of strong cross-sector relationships.

The strategic partnership between ADM+S and Humanitech was cultivated in 2018 to inform research and ensure ethical and streamlined industry processes. It is a commitment to improving collective understanding between civil society and research organisations of the potential benefits and risks of emerging technologies and aims to inform public debate and create resources for those tackling the problems created by automated decision-making.

Among all the difficulties created by the pandemic, the ADM+S Centre has achieved a great deal. After our first full year of activity, we now have over 175 members working on 40 research projects with 33 partner organisations. 57 research students are now working in the Centre.

Our extraordinary progress is the result of the dedication and creativity of our researchers, our professional staff, and our close collaborations with our partners and colleagues.

The Australian Research Council officially announced the launch of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S) at a reception held on Tuesday 7 December 2021.

Supported by grants of up to $71 million over 7 years, the new, cross-disciplinary, national research centre, aims to create the knowledge and strategies necessary for responsible, ethical, and inclusive automated decision-making. The Centre, which is led by Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas and Professor Jean Burgess, is based at RMIT University in Melbourne with nodes located at 8 other Australian universities, and partnerships with organisations around the world.

Australian Research Council Chief Executive Officer Professor Sue Thomas commended the Centre for “assembling a strong and diverse team from across social and technological disciplines” to investigate the advances and applications of automated decision-making in Australia.

True to the collaborative ethos of the Centre, the launch event was held in-person in Melbourne with satellite events in Sydney and Brisbane, and live-streamed online.

Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) are using citizen scientists to understand the impact of online search recommendations and advertising practices on Australian internet users.

The Australian Search Experience and The Australian Ad Observatory projects, launched earlier this year, are generating datasets that represent the online experiences of varied demographic groups in Australia.

Professor Julian Thomas, Director of the ADM+S Centre, said the projects are critical to enabling greater understanding of the operations of search engines and social media advertising platforms.

‘Australians use search engines and social media every day, but there is little public knowledge of how these platforms work, and misconceptions abound. Enlisting citizen scientists helps us analyse the automated systems that lie behind the content that individual users see,’ says Professor Thomas. ‘By using a citizen science approach, we can also increase awareness of the potential social impacts of these systems and encourage informed public debate about the regulation and future development of these systems.’

Both citizen science projects will be seeking participants until mid-2022.

The Australian Search Experience 

The Australian Search Experience project investigates the role of personalisation in shaping the information that Australian internet users find online.

Professor Axel Bruns, Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) said the project studies the personalisation of search results for critical news and information, across key platforms including Google and YouTube, based on the profiles these platforms establish for their different users.

‘Search engine personalisation may be influencing your search results and consequently shaping what you know of the world. This can affect personal decisions as well as collective decisions as a society – from how we spend our money, to whom we vote for, and to our attitudes on critical issues like the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.’

ADM+S research fellows Dr Henry Fraser and José-Miguel Bello y Villarino have received the 2022 Scotiabank Global AI + Regulation Emerging Scholar Award for best paper from the AI + Society Initiative at the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology and Society.

The award recognises emerging scholars in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and regulation and supports research seeking to (re)define problems and identify solutions to challenging issues related to ethical AI and technology development.

The successful paper was selected by an international review committee of leading scholars in the field of AI and Law. The paper Where residual risks reside: Lessons for Europe’s risk-based AI regulation from other domains explores the question of how to judge the acceptability of “residual risks” in the European Union’s Proposal for a Regulation laying down harmonized rules on Artificial Intelligence (the Proposal).

The Proposal is a risk-based regulation that prohibits certain uses of AI and imposes several layers of risk controls upon “high-risk” AI systems.

TikTok is being used to reach younger voters ahead of next year’s federal election. One such account ‘Gen Z for Albo’ is run on a voluntary basis and includes content that adapts trending sounds and anti-Scott Morrison commentary and shows short clips of Liberal or National politicians stumbling during press conferences.

In contrast, a report last month found that a US-based marketing firm claiming to work for the Labor Party was offering to pay TikTok users to post anti-Scott Morrison sponsored content.

Are you interested in participating in a Public Interest Sex Tech Hackathon for Valentine’s Day?

What does public interest sex tech look like in an age of surveillance capitalism, when our data is collected and monetised at scale? How would inclusive design by and for marginalised communities impact the kinds of sex tech that is available?

Is it possible to design and govern ethical sex tech at scale? What would counter-surveillance sex tech look like, that studies ‘up’ to analyse the sexual practices of big tech?

The ADM+S has partnered with global software consultancy firm Thoughtworks and training academy for sextech start-ups and professionals, SexTech School to host the Sex Tech Hackathon 2022 in-person in Melbourne on 11, 12 and 13 February 2022.

The hackathon aims to brings together designers, technologists and communities to workshop how sexual technologies can be designed and governed in ways that prioritise public interest benefit.

It will investigate what intersectional, public interest sex tech could look like, how intimate data can be collected, stored and shared in more ethical ways, and whether ‘big data’ can be used for sexual and reproductive health, wellbeing, rights and pleasure.

Australia’s federal government recently introduced legislation that would require social media companies to collect user details and hand over their identities in defamation cases. This is based on the assumption that abuse, bigotry and trolling on the internet is largely produced by anonymity.

In an article published in the ABC, ADM+S researchers explain how this premise is flawed, citing that the vast majority of online harm is perpetuated by verifiable accounts.

Christmas and Black Friday are periods of intense pressure for e-commerce workers. In an industry with high turnover and injury rates, there are concerns that working conditions are overwhelming by design.

In an article published in The Conversation, the team behind the ADM+S research project ‘Automated Precarity’ share the concerning statistics behind working conditions at Amazon and similar companies. Research has shown that the pressure of long hours, high speeds and low job security leads to high attrition rates that benefit the companies that workers resign from.

Artificial intelligence is often considered as making neutral decisions based on purely mathematical analysis of data. While this is somewhat true, the reality of human bias and exploitation undercuts this utopian vision.

In an article published in the ABC, ADM+S Research Fellow Dr Jathan Sadowski describes the prevalence of automated decision-making systems in our everyday lives, from assessing insurance claims to recommending songs on Spotify. These algorithmic programs sort through massive amounts of data in order to make informed decisions about humans—what they like, if they can pay back a loan, or whether or not they should receive a fine.

Professor Jean Burgess, Associate Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), has been elected as one of the 25 new Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities – the highest honour for humanities scholars in Australia.

Academy President, Lesley Head FASSA FAHA announced the new Fellows yesterday.

“I am honoured to welcome our new Fellows to the Academy, elected in recognition of their distinguished achievement in the humanities and arts disciplines and for their outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life,” said Professor Head.

Online harm has become a fact of life on many social media platforms, particularly in cases of women experiencing virulent misogyny. These spaces are largely unregulated, and instigators are able to perpetuate abuse without threat of consequence.

Dr Rosalie Gillett (Research Fellow at ADM+S and ABC Top 5 Humanities Scholar) writes about the need for more robust online regulation in an article published in the ABC. While companies such as Bumble and Twitter have taken steps to allow users to access therapy services and better curate their online experience, online platforms are still not doing enough to regulate the “Wild West” spaces of the internet.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) has partnered with Telstra on a four-year study which will measure digital inclusion across Australia’s remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

The objectives of the project titled ‘Mapping the Digital Gap’ are to:

1. Generate the most detailed account to date of the distribution of digital inclusion and uses of digital and media services within remote First Nations communities, and to track changes over time; and
2. Support the development of appropriate community-driven strategies for addressing identified barriers to digital inclusion and building local capabilities to enable informed decision-making. These capabilities include the relevant data collection and analysis skills involved in the measurement of digital inclusion.

The project comes at a critical time with a new Closing the Gap target to close the digital inclusion gap by 2026, and with the digital transformation to online service delivery driving the need for improved access, affordability and digital ability throughout remote Australia.

Lauren Ganley, Head of First Nations Strategy & Engagement at Telstra, will work alongside ADM+S researchers on this comprehensive study, which is being undertaken in partnership with local organisations in up to 12 remote First Nations communities spread throughout remote Australia.

Prof Axel Bruns, Prof Jean Burgess, Prof Deborah Lupton, Prof Sarah Pink, and Prof Haiqing Yu from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) have been recognised in The Australian’s 2021 Research Magazine which lists “the best researchers and the best research institutions in Australia” (The Australian 2021).

The annual Research Magazine acknowledges the talent and dedication of Australian researchers by comprehensively scanning online data to identify the best researcher and the best research institution in each field, based on the excellence of their research and the impact it has in discovery and scholarship.

ADM+S PhD Student Jiyoon Lee, based at Monash University, is investigating how to improve the design of transport services for senior citizens in Melbourne. Her research project ‘Mobility-as-a-Service for Senior Citizens’ (project ID 30005) focuses on the integration of mobility services in a single digital platform.

As part of her fieldwork, Jiyoon is calling for participants aged 65 years or older, who use private or public transport in Melbourne to get involved in her research. Participants will be asked to complete a short survey, take part in two 1-hour interviews, and keep a travel diary for a week. As a token of appreciation, each participant will receive a $50 gift card at the completion of the research.

Join us for a critical dialogue with Assoc. Prof Safiya Noble, Prof Bronwyn Carlson and Karaitiana Taiuru,  hosted by the ADM+S Centre’s Social Services Focus Area.

Automated decision making (ADM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are rapidly expanding into all aspects of our lives and radically reshaping our experiences of ourselves as well as our relations with one another, governmental entities, and corporations. Often framed as efficient, accurate and objective, these technologies can have widely disparate impacts across populations and societies, often exacerbating pre-existing inequalities, discrimination, and disadvantage. This event is part of a series of critical engagements with the various ways ADM/AI intersect with race/ethnicity, gender/sex, class, dis/ability, and space.

Wednesday 17 November 2021
10am- 11.30am (AEDT)
Online via Zoom
Register here

For more information, please visit the event page or contact Prof Paul Henman at p.henman@uq.edu.au.

Several researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S) are slated to present at the 2021 Australian Social Policy Conference (ASPC) being held online over the next two weeks from October 25 to November 5.

The biennial conference, hosted by the UNSW Social Policy Research Centre, is the country’s leading event for the discussion and dissemination of social policy research.

The ASPC provides a forum for leading national and international researchers and analysts from government and community social welfare sectors in Australia and internationally to present their research findings and debate their implications, attracting participants from academia, government and the community social welfare sector internationally.

“This is the first time the conference has featured sessions on the role of digital technology in social policy and service delivery. The centrality of people from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society demonstrate how its work is leading these important research agenda, policy developments and public debates,” said ADM+S Chief Investigator Professor Paul Henman who is chairing a number of sessions at the conference.

A national ‘citizen science’ project has been launched to delve into Facebook’s use of ‘dark ads’ that target users based on detailed information collected about them online.

The Australian Ad Observatory project, is an ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) research initiative led by QUT’s Professor Daniel Angus and Professor Mark Andrejevic from Monash University and aims to provide accountability and transparency around Facebook’s use of advertising.

To find out how they are being targeted participants can install an extension on their laptop or desktop Web browser that collects all the ads they see when they go on Facebook. Users will gain an understanding of the pattern of the ads and an idea of whether they are being targeted for particular types of products or services.

The extension also allows researchers to see overall patterns of ad targeting and only collects the ads (posts identified as ‘sponsored content’) and not any personal information other than demographic information supplied by users when installing the extension.

“The goal is to provide some visibility into a form of advertising that is no longer publicly visible because it is delivered on personal devices based on large, private collections of data,” said Professor Angus.

“Far removed from the free and open ideals of the early web, today the vast bulk of our personal data is held within ‘walled gardens’ controlled by a handful of tech giants such as Facebook.

“This data is a goldmine for advertisers and online advertising works very differently to other more traditional mediums.

“With television, anyone watching the same channel in the same region sees the same ad. On your personal digital devices, however, the ad may be targeted to you based on detailed information about your past behaviour, your interests, and your preferences.

“It can also be tailored to you based on a psychological profile that suggests what type of advertising appeal might work best for you. It could be fear based, for example, or a humour-based one.

“The use of ‘dark ads’ has made it possible to discriminate in online advertising and to engage in forms of stereotyping and manipulation that are invisible to consumers.”

The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2021 (ADII), published today, shows digital inclusion at the national level is improving, but a substantial number of Australians remain excluded.

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic requiring greater reliance on online technologies to manage daily life, digital inclusion is more important than ever; and while the nation has seen improvements overall, these improvements are not evenly shared by all Australians.

Key findings from the 2021 Index:

• Affordability remains central to closing the digital divide. Based on our Affordability measure, 14% of all Australians would need to pay more than 10% of their household income to gain quality, and reliable connectivity.
• The national Index score in 2021 is 71.1, up 3.6 points from the 2020 score of 67.5.
• Australian Capital Territory ranked highest with an Index score of 77. The least digitally included states are South Australia (69) and Tasmania (66).
• The divide between metropolitan and regional areas has narrowed but remains marked. Regional areas recorded an Index score in 2021 of 67.4. This is 3.6 points less than the national average (71.1), and 5.5 points less than metropolitan Australia (72.9).
• The percentage of highly excluded Australians has decreased between 2020 and 2021. In 2020, 17% of the Australian population were highly excluded (defined as recording an Index score of 45 or below). In 2021, this has dropped to 11% of the population.
• The percentage of excluded Australians (defined as recording an Index score of above 45 and below 61) has not changed since 2020 and remains at 17% of the national population.
• Taken together, the number of highly excluded and excluded Australians is substantial, equalling 28% of the national population in 2021.
• Cyber safety is also a significant concern for highly excluded and excluded Australians, with this concern rising 3% between 2020 and 2021. In 2021, 20% of highly excluded and excluded Australians are so concerned about privacy and scams that it limits their internet use.

*ADII scores range from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the greater the level of digital inclusion. ADII scores are relative: they allow comparisons across different social groups and geographic areas, and over time.

* ADII scores may not add up due to rounding.

“Recent experience has underlined the importance of affordable and accessible digital services for all Australians. The Index results show we have more work to do to ensure that all Australians are included as we move online,” said Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society at RMIT.

For Telstra, understanding the gaps across Australia helps them make sure they’re directing their support to the right areas.

“This data helps us make sure that we’re targeting our support to areas where we can really make a difference,” said Lyndall Stoyles, Telstra’s Group Executive for Sustainability, External Affairs and Legal.

ADM+S PhD researchers Megan Kelleher and Kelsie Nabben, both based at RMIT University, have been selected to participate in Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and The New School’s Platform Cooperativism Consortium Fall 2021 Research Sprint.

The Alternative Data Futures: Cooperative Principles, Data Trusts, and the Digital Economy Research Sprint brings together researchers and practitioners from around the world to investigate the design and dilemmas of data trusts and cooperatives and how they can help communities.

Megan and Kelsie are among the 12 participants who are taking part in the Sprint—a mix of early-career researchers, cooperative leaders, and activists from 8 countries across 4 continents.

The ADM+S Centre’s Wikimedian-In-Residence, Dr Amanda Lawrence, is hosting an Automated Decision-Making Wikipedia Edit-a-thon to improve the information related to ADM on Wikipedia, Wikidata and other Wikimedia platforms.

The edit-a-thon will focus on refining this stub page on automated decision-making as well as improving and creating pages for related content, people and organisations.

ADM+S Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
10am- 1pm
Wednesday 27 October 2021
Online
Register here

Researchers and industry experts gathered at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) News and Media Research Symposium last week to address crucial challenges associated with the use of automation, algorithms and artificial intelligence in news, media and online entertainment.

The ADM+S News and Media Research Symposium, hosted at QUT, was co-sponsored by QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre. The event showcased the breadth and depth of research conducted at ADM+S in the news and media focus area to over 150 attendees in-person and online.

National and international delegates discussed issues related to automated decision-making systems used in search engines, recommendation systems, personalised newsfeeds, content moderation systems, and programmatic advertising.

The launch of the Australian Ad Observatory project, and early findings from the Australian Search Experience project were just some of the event’s highlights.

“It is very exciting to have these two major projects underway”, said ADM+S News and Media Focus Area leader Professor Axel Bruns.

“Both of them help to create more transparency about how the major digital media platforms use algorithms and automation to determine what information, content and advertising different Australian users see – and we actively engage the public in this process.”

The event also marked the transition of leadership of the News and Media Focus Area from Professor Bruns to incoming co-leaders Professor Jean Burgess (QUT) and Dr James Meese (RMIT).

Drone delivery company Wing recently celebrated 100,000 deliveries, with their two biggest trial sites in Canberra and Logan. The COVID-19 pandemic is helping companies like Wing to accelerate their agenda, as they can promise less congestion, less consumer mobility, and less social contact.

The ADM+S Centre launched its latest data donation project on October 1. This project is asking members of the public to install a browser extension that aims to provide accountability and transparency around the social media giant’s use of targeted advertising.

The Australian Ad Observatory will collect Facebook users’ personalised or ‘dark’ ads and develop strategies for addressing the potential harms associated with them.

The project is led by Monash University’s Professor Mark Andrejevic as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).

Researchers from ADM+S developed the tool to attempt to make public the ads that are being served to people online and how advertising is distributed across demographic groups.

Once Facebook users install the browser plugin it will identify sponsored advertising content, take a snapshot of the content and send it back to a central server, allowing researchers to build an independent archive of advertising materials that are shown to Facebook users.

“Dark ads pose a host of potential social harms, from discrimination, the propagation of racist or gender stereotyping, and the spread of false and harmful information,” Professor Andrejevic said.

“It is important to hold advertising systems accountable for the forms of messaging they promulgate.

“Online advertising and digital marketing takes place on a mass scale and a large majority of its distribution is automated – therefore the systems don’t know when they’re engaging in regressive, racist or sexual activity as they are driven by the goal of maximising clicks and responses.”

A recent survey of 1,094 people conducted by Essential Research on behalf of the ADM+S Centre revealed less than half (41 per cent) of participants felt Facebook advertising was relevant to them.

News and other media platforms in Australia and elsewhere face growing challenges from automated decision-making, but the future is not all bad say researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society gathering this week for a conference on the topic.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) News and Media Research Symposium is an in-person and online event on 30 September and 1 October, hosted at the QUT Kelvin Grove campus.

Speakers include Professor Axel Bruns, an internationally renowned Internet researcher in QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre, who will present early findings of the Australian Search Experience project involving ADM+S researchers and the international research and advocacy organisation AlgorithmWatch.

The symposium will be launching the anticipated Australian Ad Observatory project led by Professor Mark Andrejevic (Monash University). The Australian Ad Observatory is investigating the potential harms of customised targeted advertising online. The project uses a data donation model to collect the ads that users are being served on Facebook.

Other topics being covered over the two days include news and automation, digital inclusion and media use in remote First Nations communities, Facebook advertising, automated content curation and moderation, and platform governance on matters relating to race, gender, and sexuality.

Professor Bruns said news and media was chosen as the first of four focus areas over the lifetime of the ADM+S Centre because automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence already posed some crucial challenges for this industry, and that further research on these topics was urgently required.

The ADM+S Centre’s Research Training and Career Development Committee have selected the first round of participants to take part in a bespoke media training program.

The program will consist of tailored, private sessions with global branding and design expert Dr Anna Harrison who will help researchers develop their skills in communications, research translation, personal branding, and media presence. Participants will be equipped with the confidence to engage with media and be on their way to building their profile as a researcher, lending credibility to their own career and that of the collective ADM+S Centre.

Congratulations to the following ADM+S researchers selected to participate in our pilot program:

• Dr José-Miguel Bello Villarino (Research Fellow, University of Sydney)
• Samuel Kininmonth (PhD Student, RMIT University)
• Dr Indigo Holcombe-James (Research Fellow, RMIT University)
• Dr Georgia van Toorn (Research Fellow, UNSW)

After completing a Master of International Relations at the University of Melbourne, Lauren Kelly had always been interested in pursuing her PhD but was waiting for the right opportunity. When she came across the ADM+S Centre’s Scholarship, she knew it would be a great fit for her research interests in labour, technology, and the future of work.

“Receiving an ADM+S PhD scholarship means a lot to me. I’ve already learned so much from this community of incredible scholars. It feels good to be contributing the broader goals of the Centre and I really hope to give back as much as I can, ” says Lauren.

Growing up, the topic of work was a big one in Lauren’s family and early on she became aware that unfair or exploitative working conditions can affect a whole family. Having worked a lot of difficult jobs herself, Lauren’s interest in work and labour conditions deepened.

“In my early 20s I was unironically fired from a call centre for reading Marx’s “Capital” in between calls (we weren’t allowed to read)! Now, reflecting on that is quite funny and I realise it was definitely a life changing moment for me. I got interested in unionism after that and things went from there,” says Lauren who has now worked in the Australian union movement for five years.

Rakesh Kumar is a recipient of an ADM+S PhD Scholarship at the Centre’s University of Western Sydney node, under the supervision of Chief Investigator Prof Heather Horst.

With experience in both the corporate and private sectors in technology and programmes enhancing employability of students and young people, Rakesh is interested in examining the algorithmic conditioning of platform decisions for migrant digital businesses and whether biases faced by migrants in real life is mitigated or exacerbated by these algorithms.

Rakesh’s thesis ‘Platforms, Labour, Migration: Entrepreneurial platform work among Indian migrants in Australia’ will look at entrepreneurial work on digital platforms performed by Indian migrants in Australia, specifically around digital food and online wellness.

ADM+S Chief Investigator Prof Deborah Lupton is the recipient of the 2021 Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DASSH) Awards for Leadership in Excellence and Innovation – International Award.

Prof Lupton’s innovative project ‘Doing fieldwork in a pandemic’ was recognised for “providing a wonderful set of resources for scholars around the world [and] has shone a light on the creativity and capacity of HASS (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) researchers in Australia and New Zealand” (DASSH 2021).

“Like many other social researchers around the world, I was faced with how to continue with my projects when we and our research participants were subjected to COVID lockdown restrictions. I jumped onto Google Docs and started up a crowdsourced resource for providing ideas that quickly grew to almost 40 pages long. It was great to see how many researchers globally contributed to or shared the resource, helping projects move forward during this difficult time,” says Prof Lupton.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society at RMIT, the Centre for Social Impact Swinburne, and Telstra are proud to launch the first findings from our refreshed 2021 Australian Digital Inclusion Index.

Join us to find out how Australia is tracking, gain insights for better digital inclusion programs, and take a first look at the new dashboards which put the Index data in your hands.

Friday 15 October 2021
1.30-2.30pm
Online
Register here 

As lockdowns continue across Australia, many households are doing something they may not have considered just 18 months ago: ordering groceries online.

Australia’s supermarket duopoly, Coles and Woolworths, have raced to implement new technology and transform labour arrangements to keep up with the e-grocery boom.
Both are investing in “smart” warehousing and distribution systems with various degrees of automation, as well as making extensive use of app-driven gig workers for grocery picking and delivery via platforms such as Uber and Airtasker.

ADM+S PhD Candidate, Lauren Kelly, is investigating automated decision-making systems in Australia’s supermarket warehouses, and considers what technological change means for workers. Her research suggests a reimagining of the Australian supermarket is currently underway, speeding up the trend towards on-demand and precarious labour.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society’s (ADM+S) Partner Investigator Prof Karen Yeung and colleague Dr Lena Ulbricht have guest-edited a Special Issue on Algorithmic Regulation in the journal Regulation & Governance.

The primary aim of this Special Issue is to critically investigate, refine, and build upon the concept of algorithmic regulation, an analytical construct for investigating the role of algorithms as a mode of social coordination and control in concrete contexts of application. The contributions to this volume offer empirical and conceptual insight which, taken together, provide a fruitful vantage point from which to consider the concept as a vehicle for critical scholarly inquiry. While the academic interest in data and algorithms and digital transformations in society has proliferated since 2017, this Issue offers several observations about what is distinctive about the concept and how it can support critical cross-disciplinary investigation and analysis.

It is often difficult for social researchers to elicit the public’s understanding and practice of emerging digital technologies—even experts disagree on how exactly to define such terms as ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘automated decision-making (ADM)’.

In an effort to address this, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) Chief Investigator and leader of the Health Focus Area Professor Deborah Lupton convened two half-day online workshops in August to explore innovative methods for researching ADM and AI in the domains of health and medicine to help research participants respond to questions and think creatively about these technologies.

The workshops featured presentations from ADM+S Centre researchers as well as guest speakers from the University of Wollongong’s Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values, and RMIT University’s Digital Ethnography Research Centre, Care-full Design Lab and Social and Global Studies Centre.

Workshop 1, held 10 August, began with presentations from researchers in the ADM+S Centre’s Health Focus Area at UNSW Sydney. Prof Jackie Leach Scully spoke on using dialogue groups to explore moral understandings, Prof Deborah Lupton and Dr Ash Watson discussed creative writing prompts and online workshops, and then Dr Watson and Dr Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor talked about their cultural probes method. The second session of this workshop featured speakers from the University of Wollongong. Dr Yves Saint James Aquino presented on translating normative theory into empirical research practices, followed by Prof Annette Braunack-Mayer on engaging publics using citizens juries, and then Prof Stacy Carter discussed a range of speculative methods for eliciting understandings of AI in health.

Three researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S Centre) are recipients of the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) scheme for 2022.

Associate Investigator Sarah Erfani, based at the Centre’s University of Melbourne node, received a grant of $403,482 for her project on anomaly detection in cyber security. The project, Making Anomaly Detection Interpretable & Actionable in Hostile Environments, aims to identify and interpret anomalies that can disrupt system performance by introducing the concept of actionable anomalies. It will significantly advance the effectiveness of anomaly detection by developing algorithms that distil local and global structures of data to characterise actionable anomalies and explain their outlying aspects. Project outcomes will enhance the security, trustworthiness and fault-tolerance of critical systems, contributing to international efforts in cyber security.

Associate Investigator Timothy Graham from Queensland University of Technology was awarded $452,000 for his project Combating Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour on Social Media. The project will develop cutting-edge methods and workflows to accurately distinguish genuine activity from coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and to trace and evaluate the adoption of material spread by malicious actors across multiple platforms.

Research Fellow Jathan Sadowski of Monash University received $421,200 in funding for his project Everyday Insurtech: Impacts of Emerging Technology for Insurance. The project will investigate the emerging insurance technology (insurtech) sector and conduct the first major empirical study of insurtech’s implementation and impacts in Australia, with a focus on automotive, health, and property coverage. The project will result in effective and efficient insurance services for Australians by ensuring risks of insurtech are avoided.

Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) have been awarded ARC Future Fellowships with over three million dollars of funding to support research projects that tackle issues of national priority.

ARC Future Fellowships reflects the Australian Government’s commitment to excellence in research by supporting excellent mid-career researchers to undertake high-quality research in areas of national and international benefit.

ADM+S Future Fellowship recipients:

• Professor Kath Albury: Digital and data literacies for sexual health policy and practice
• Associate Professor Paul Harpur: Normalising Ability Diversity through Career Transitions: Disability at Work
• Professor Nicolas Suzor: Regulating and countering structural inequality on digital platforms

The breadth of issues that these research projects address demonstrates the cross-disciplinary strengths of the ADM+S Centre.

“We’re delighted by the successes of our ADM+S colleagues in the ARC’s 2021 Future Fellowship round”, said Centre Director Julian Thomas.

“The Future Fellowship scheme plays a vital role in supporting Australia’s next generation of research leaders. Our Centre benefits enormously from the extraordinary work these scholars are doing in illuminating both the positive social possibilities and the hazards of our increasingly connected lives.”

The ADM+S Centre’s Research Training Program has announced the recipients for round 1 of the 2021 ECR Seed Funding Grants. The ECR Seed Funding Grants aim to provide support to the Centre’s early career researchers by funding research projects across the Centre’s nodes, programs and focus areas.

“We are excited to support the first seed funding grants for early career researchers who are developing new ideas, projects and collaborations to further our understanding of the social, legal and technical implications automated decision-making at this critical stage of the centre and the field,” says Chief Investigator Heather Horst, co-leader of the research training program.

Out of the 11 project proposals submitted, 6 were awarded based on high impact outcomes, cross collaboration across ADM+S research groups, focus areas and nodes, and project teams).

The awardees of this funding round include:

• Prioritising women’s safety: Intersections of automation, systems abuse and domestic violence.
  Project Lead: Dr Lyndal Sleep
  As automation increases across all sectors, the potential for automation to be harnessed in systems abuse by domestic violence perpetrators also increases. The proposed project aims to build capacity in the Centre to research the intersections of automation, systems abuse and domestic violence across multiple nodes, programs and research areas. This will be done by establishing a research group of ECRs to work on a series of workshops to produce a literature review of this new area, and draft a co-authored paper with all members of the research group as authors. The paper will be submitted to a high ranked academic journal. The research group involves ECRs from multiple nodes, streams and research focus areas. The funding is for a research assistant to support the literature review.
• Precarious warehouse work and the automation of logistical mobilities: Understanding Amazon in the Australian context
  Project Lead: Dr Chris O’Neill
  This will be the first academic research project to analyse Amazon’s Australian ‘fulfilment centres’. We will study how automated mobility technologies are being deployed in Amazon’s new warehouses alongside other automated management and worker monitoring tools. Our research will combine interviews with warehouse workers and members of the communities proximate to Amazon’s Australian warehouses, alongside analysis of Amazon’s Australian corporate strategy and technology implementation, and a review of relevant workplace surveillance laws. The project will produce an integrated analysis of the use of automated mobility technologies alongside other automated management techniques, with a view towards developing recommendations for the responsible and ethical development of automated systems and sustainable labour practices, as well as canvassing the possibility of reform in Victoria’s workplace privacy regime.
• Ethical Data Governance of Sex Tech
  Project Lead: Dr Zahra Stardust
  This project brings together industry, civil society and academia to workshop how innovative sexual technologies can be governed at scale in ways that prioritise public interest benefit and feminist data ethics, in order to reduce the harmful impacts of algorithmic sexual profiling. Comprised of two components – an industry workshop and a community hackathon – the project will operate in partnership between three ADM+S nodes (QUT, Swinburne and RMIT), global software consultancy firm Thoughtworks and the international Sex Tech School, an established private training academy for sextech start-ups and professionals. The workshop will involve facilitated conversations about ethical data governance as part of the Sex Tech School, while the hackathon will build on these insights to investigate how community stakeholders understand inclusive sex technologies for public benefit. With a built-in research component to collect data, we will produce two high impact Q1 journal articles, a community report and two podcast episodes, which will apply theoretical frameworks on data feminism, accountable governance, public interest technology and counter-surveillance to the contemporary sex tech field.

In a recent interview on “Talks at Google”, ADM+S researchers Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy discuss their book “The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist”.

Speaking with moderator Jan Schneider, Yolande and Jenny point out that the design of gendered devices reinscribes outdated and unfounded stereotypes and the impacts of advanced technology design on gender equity.

In this opinion piece published on The Medium,  Silvia Montaña-Niño discusses how the use of engagement metrics and incentive models in newsrooms are leading to a profound shift in newsworkers’ professional identities and the way that a journalist works. This article identifies several factors that are driving journalists towards an individualist journalism model and highlights the problems with monetising newsroom metrics in relation to journalism for the interest of the public and positioning journalists as influencers.

Do search engines influence you more than you think? Now is your chance to help researchers find out.

In 2020, Google processed more than 3.5 billion searches a day – and Forbes Magazine reports that most people see search engines as the most trusted source of information. But not all searches produce the same results.

Search engines adjust their recommendations to suit our interests. The big question is how such personalisation can influence our decisions on anything from where to holiday to whether we get a COVID-19 vaccine.

The new Australian Search Experience project aims to find out. It invites Australian Internet users to join the project as citizen scientists, and download a simple browser plugin to their computer. To install the plugin, simply go to https://staging.admscentre.org.au/searchexperience/ and follow the instructions.

The plugin runs regular searches for common search terms, and reports the results back to the research project. Across thousands of participants, these individual data donations produce a comprehensive picture of what search results different Australians encounter. The plugin won’t transmit any private data at any time.

The project is a partnership between researchers from Australian universities within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society (ADM+S) and the international research and advocacy organisation AlgorithmWatch.

Chief investigator Professor Axel Bruns, an internationally renowned Internet researcher in the ADM+S Centre and QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship earlier this month, said the project explores whether search engines have the potential to create ‘filter bubbles’ or to promote misinformation and disinformation.

“There is a lot of speculation about the impact search engines have on the information we encounter. But we really know very little about how they order and display that information,” said Professor Bruns, whose most recent book is Are Filter Bubbles Real?

“Search engine personalisation may be influencing your search results and consequently shaping what you know of the world. This can affect personal decisions as well as collective decisions as a society – from how we spend our money to who we vote for, and to our attitudes on critical issues like the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

ADM+S Research Fellows Dr Rosalie Gillett (Queensland University of Technology) and Dr Jathan Sadowski (Monash University) are recipients of the 2021 ABC TOP 5 Media Residency Program (Humanities), a program which enables some of Australia’s brightest minds to share their skills with the nation.

Rosalie and Jathan were two of five Australian researchers selected for the humanities media residency program for 2021 and will undertake a two-week online residency with ABC Radio National to learn the craft of communicating with a wide audience from some of Australia’s best broadcasters, and how to develop content across radio and digital platforms.

Jathan says “The Top 5 residency is such a great opportunity to learn new skills for communicating research and producing stories about technology and society.”

The ARC Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) has received a $2.16 million grant from the Victorian Government Higher Education Investment Fund (VGHEIF) to enhance and upgrade the Centre’s technology and research infrastructure at it’s administering organisation, RMIT University.

The VGHEIF scheme was developed in response to the significant impact of the coronavirus pandemic on universities and is intended to cover a raft of individual research projects and capital works, all with a unique focus on community-based renewal.

Former RMIT Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Martin Bean CBE said the facilities and activities funded by the government would help RMIT contribute to Victoria’s social and economic response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and create jobs, enterprises and opportunities for the future.

“RMIT has been proudly working together with the Victorian Government to develop new ways of creating skills, offering educational pathways, partnering with industry, and solving shared community problems. Activating this unique precinct and strengthening its connections with other parts of this great city will create long-lasting benefit for the Victorian economy and community. It is a wonderful milestone for the future of a 20-year vision,” said Professor Bean. 

In this opinion piece published by ABC online news, Jathan Sadowski and Yolande Strangers discuss consent in the context of technological interactions. Based on their recently published research, they argue that the “tech industry needs to go beyond consent events that focus on obtaining one-time, “yes” or “no” consent at the start of a technological interaction, such as during product sign-up”.

They propose an alternative model, inspired by sexual consent best practices from the BDSM community — bondage, domination, submission, masochism — which has been at the forefront of not only understanding but implementing consent as an open dialogue, rather than a single decision.

Leader of the ADM+S News and Media Focus Area, Professor Axel Bruns has been awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship.

Announced today (7 July) by Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge, Professor Axel Bruns from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre will receive $3,518,080 from the Australian Research Council (ARC) for his project Determining the Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate.

Professor Bruns said escalating partisanship and polarisation, particularly via online and social media platforms, presented an urgent challenge for western democracies including Australia and a threat to cybersecurity worldwide.

The five-year Laureate Fellowship project will conduct the first-ever assessment of the extent and dynamics of polarisation in the contemporary online and social media environments of six nations – Australia, the US, the UK, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland.

“We aim to enable an urgently needed defence of our society and democracy against the challenges of polarisation,” said Professor Bruns, a recognised world leader in media, communication, and journalism studies, with a particular focus on the evolution of online communication practices.

“Polarisation intensifies social conflicts, threatens economic prosperity, undermines public trust, and ultimately destabilises societies. Such instability can be exploited by domestic extremists or foreign influence campaigns to weaken sovereign states.

ADM+S Chief Investigator Deborah Lupton and her colleagues Blanca Gallego Luxan, Louisa Jorm, Sze-Yuan Ooi, Jennifer Yu, Nigel Lovell, and Juan Quiro were recently awarded with a $549,000 grant for the project ‘Cardiac AI: deep learning to predict and prevent secondary cardiovascular events’.

Administered by the Centre for Big Data Research in Health at UNSW Sydney with partner organisations eHealth NSW and South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, the project will use electronic medical record data and artificial intelligence technologies to develop and implement an algorithm to identify cardiac patients who are at high risk of a further cardiovascular event before they are discharged from hospital. This will enable the targeting of more intensive interventions such as higher potency medications or home monitoring programs to those more likely to benefit. The algorithm and a prototype visualisation dashboard will be developed ready for implementation at South Eastern Sydney Local Health District (SESLHD).

In an article published in The Conversation, James Meese (Associate Investigator at ADM+S), Edward Hurcombe (QUT) and Franscesco Bailo (University of Technology, Sydney) share their findings from their recent peer-reviewed research about the impacts of Facebook’s algorithmic distribution on Australian news media.

Based on a data set of 2 million unique posts, from January 1 2014 to December 15 2020, this article clearly demonstrates a decline in Facebook news engagement since 2014-16.

A new podcast series from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) features insights from researchers and industry experts on the potential and unseen impacts of automated decision-making on society. The series is available on our website, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Utopian visions of automated decision-making (ADM) promise new levels of personalisation, control and choice in our future lives. Yet, we still know very little about how automated services are really being incorporated, re-invented or resisted as part of everyday lives. Automation has great potential benefits, but it can also create serious new risks to human rights and welfare.

This insightful and thought-provoking series features conversations with researchers and practitioners who are creating the knowledge and strategies necessary for responsible, ethical, and inclusive automated decision-making.

The initial series explores the impacts of automation in news and media. The topics range from search personalisation, the spread of conspiracy theories; to the influence of metrics and algorithms on journalism, and the Facebook news ban.

This podcast series was created to spotlight the unseen social, cultural and institutional issues created by the rapid growth of technologies and automated decision-making systems in our society.

The ADM+S Centre’s Institutions Research Program based at Melbourne Law School, recently hosted a four-part seminar series on Alternative Data Governance and Alternative Data Economies in collaboration with MLS’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics and the ANU’s Humanising Machine Intelligence groups. The series brought eight speakers from across the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK into dialogue with discussants from ADM+S, CAIDE, HMI and the broader community.

The series began with the diagnosis that, in the digital context, laws governing privacy, data protection, and consumer protection have participated in building system of social relations in which platforms have become massive, market-like control infrastructures that have transformed individuals into ‘users’- a resource to be mined for data and attention. From there, the series explored alternative arrangements for the governance of our digitally mediated lives and economies, including collective approaches to governing data, attention, and platforms, the role of legal professionals in the ‘new economy’, and indigenous data governance for community produced data resources.

The four seminars are available online on the ADM+S Centre’s YouTube Channel:

Seminar 1 with Katharina Pistor and Salomé Viljoen (discussant Jake Goldenfein) reconceptualizing how data works in the digital economy, the ways in which platforms operate as control infrastructures, the types of social relations they instantiate, and the possibility of democratic data governance: Watch Seminar 1 Recording

The News & Media Focus Area at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society (ADM+S) is one of four Focus Areas of the Centre. The News & Media Focus Area investigates the uses and impacts of automated decision-making in news work, social media platforms, and the digital media and communication environment more broadly.

In this video, researchers from the Centre’s News & Media focus area discuss the rapid progression of automated decision-making technologies in news and digital media environments, the impacts on society, and the ADM+S projects that will investigate the influence of automated decision-making on the news and media experiences of real users.

Over time news companies have developed a growing dependency on major platforms such as Facebook and Google to distribute their news. In an article published in The Conversation, James Meese and Edward Hurcombe provide historical context to this dependency, describe the compounding effects of the pandemic, and through their research, reveal new ways that media companies are generating revenue and delivering their news.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society 2020 Annual Report is now available online.

The report highlights the significant progress made during the establishment and commencement phase of the Centre. Notably this included bringing together nine Australian universities, eight international university partners, and 14 industry partners into an international research, industry and civil society network, and establishing itself as a leading organisation at the forefront of global research.

Children and young people throughout the world have felt the effects of Coronavirus Disease 2019 and the decisions made in response to the public health crisis, acutely. Questions have been raised about adequately protecting children’s privacy, as schooling, play and socialising went almost exclusively online.

However, due to the historical lack of children’s rights being embedded throughout decision-making processes (including important participation rights), the effects of the increased surveillance as a result of the pandemic have not been thoroughly considered.

Researchers from the ADM+S Centre’s node at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) shared updates on work in progress at their second quarterly meeting on Tuesday 11 May 2021, with Centre Director Distinguished Professor Julian Thomas in attendance as part of his visit to Brisbane.

Twenty-four ADM+S QUT staff and students reported their progress, highlights and challenges on a number of significant projects that aim to address critical issues related to content moderation, platform regulation, platform governance, harm and safety in the use of online platforms, search personalisation, platform advertising, and the automation of news.

In an article published in The Conversation, ADM+S researchers Rosalie Gillett, Kath Albury and Zahra Stardust discuss the proposed dating app safety initiative between the NSW Police Force and Match Group, the American company behind popular dating platforms including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, Ship, and OurTime.