Category: Conference

CSDH/SCHN Congress 2025: Reframing Togetherness

These last few days I have been at the CSDH/SCHN conference that is part of the Congress 2025. With colleagues and graduate research assistants I was part of a number of papers and panels. See CSDH/SCHN Congress 2025: Reframing Togetherness. The programme is here. Some of the papers I was involved in included:

  • Exploring the Deceptive Patterns of Chinook: Visualization and Storytelling Approaches Critical Software Study – Roya Sharifi; Ralph Padilla; Zahra Farhangfar; Yasmeen Abu-Laban; Eleyan Sawafta; and Geoffrey Rockwell
  • Building a Consortium: An Approach to Sustainability – Geoffrey Martin Rockwell; Michael Sinatra; Susan Brown; John Bradley; Ayushi Khemka; and Andrew MacDonald
  • Integrating Large Language Models with Spyral Notebooks – Sean Lis and Geoffrey Rockwell
  • AI-Driven Textual Analysis to Decode Canadian Immigration Social Media Discourse – Augustine Farinola & Geoffrey Martin Rockwell
  • The List in Text Analysis – Geoffrey Martin Rockwell; Ryan Chartier; and Andrew MacDonald

I was also part of a panel on Generative AI, LLMs, and Knowledge Structures organized by Ray Siemens. My paper was on Forging Interpretations with Generative AI. Here is the abstract:

Using large language models we can now generate fairly sophisticated interpretations of documents using natural language prompts. We can ask for classifications, summaries, visualizations, or specific content to be extracted. In short we can automate content analysis of the sort we used to count as research. As we play with the forging of interpretations at scale we need to consider the ethics of using generative AI in our research. We need to ask how we can use these models with respect for sources, care for transparency, and attention to positionality.

Responsible AI Lecture in Delhi

A couple of days ago I gave an Institute Lecture on What is Responsible About Responsible AI at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. In it I looked at how AI ethics governance is discussed in Canada under the rubric of Responsible AI and AI Safety. I talked about the emergence of AI Safety Institutes like CAISI (Canadian AI Safety Institute.) Just when it seemed that “safety” was the emergent international approach to ethics governance, Vice President JD Lance’s speech at the Paris Summit made it clear that the Trump administration in not interested,

The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. (Vance)

DH 2024: Visualization Ethics and Text Analysis Infrastructure

This week I’m at DH 2024 at George Mason in Washington DC. I presented as part of two sessions. 

On Wednesday I presented a short paper with Lauren Klein on work a group of us are doing on Visualization Ethics: A Case Study Approach. We met at a Dagstuhl on Visualization and the Humanities: Towards a Shared Research Agenda. We developed case studies for teaching visualization ethics and that’s what our short presentation was about. The link above is to a Google Drive with drafts of our cases.

Thursday morning I was part of a panel on Text Analysis Tools and Infrastructure in 2024 and Beyond. (The link, again, takes you to a web page where you can download the short papers we wrote for this “flipped” session.) This panel brought together a bunch of text analysis projects like WordCruncher and Lexos to talk about how we can maintain and evolve our infrastructure.

Canadian AI 2024 Conference

I’m at the Canadian AI 2024 Conference where I will be on a panel about “The Future of Responsible AI and AI for Social Good in Canada” on Thursday. This panel is timely given that we seem to be seeing a sea-change in AI regulation. If initially there was a lot of talk about the dangers (to innovation) of regulation, we now have large players like China, the US and the EU introducing regulations.

  • President Biden has issued an “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” It is unlikely that Biden can get legislation through Congress so he is issuing executive orders.
  • The EU recently passed their AI Act which is risk-based.
  • The Canadian AI and Data Act (AIDA) is coming and is similarly risk-based.

In light of AIDA I would imagine that the short-term future for Responsible AI in Canada might include the following:

  • Debate about AIDA and amendments to align it with other jurisdictions and to respond to industry concerns. Will there be a more inclusive consultation?
  • Attempts to better define what are high-impact AIs so as to better anticipate what will need onerous documentation and assessment.
  • Elaboration of how to best run an impact assessment.
  • Discussions around responsibility and how to assign it in different situations.

I hope there will also be a critical exploration of the assumptions and limits of responsible AI.

Call for papers 2024 – Replaying Japan

Replaying Japan 2024  – The 12th International Japan Game Studies Conference – [Conference Theme] Preservation, Innovation and New Directions in Japanese Game Studies [Dates] Monday, August 19 (University at Buffalo, SUNY) Tuesday, August 20 (University at Buffalo, SUNY) Wednesday, August 21 (The Strong National Museum of Play) [Locations] University at Buffalo, SUNY (North Campus) and … Continue reading “Call for papers 2024”

The Call for Papers for Replaying Japan 2024 has just gone out. The theme is Preservation, Innovation and New Directions in Japanese Game Studies.

The conference which is being organized by Tsugumi (Mimi) Okabe at the University of Buffalo is also going to have one day at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester which has a fabulous collection of Japanese video game artefacts.

The conference could be considered an example of regional game studies, but Japan is hardly at the periphery of the games industry even if it is under represented in game studies as a field. It might be more accurate to describe the conference and community that has gathered around it as a inter-regional conference where people bring very different perspectives on game studies to international discussion of Japanese game culture.

U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers on virtual reality game to get people out of their seats

U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers to refine a virtual and mixed reality video game that can improve motor skills for older adults and sedentary people.

The Folio of the University of Alberta published a story about a trip to Japan that I and others embarked on, U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers on virtual reality game to get people out of their seats. Ritsumeikan invited us to develop research collaborations around gaming, language and artificial intelligence. Our visit was a chance to further the collaborations, like the one my colleagues Eleni Stroulia and Victor Fernandez Cervantes are developing with Thawmas Ruck around games for older adults. This inter-university set of collaborations build on projects I was involved in going back to 2011, including a conference (Replaying Japan) and a journal, the Journal of Replaying Japan.

The highlight was the signing of a Memorandum Of Understanding by the two presidents (of U of A and Ritsumeikan). I was also involved as was Professor Nakamura. May the collaboration thrive.

Signing of MOU

See https://twitter.com/PTJCUA1/status/1630853467605721089

Yesterday I was part of a signing ceremony for a Memorandum of Agreement between Ritsumeikan University and the University of Alberta. I and the President of the University of Alberta (Bill Flanagan) signed on behalf of U of A. The MOU described our desire to build on our collaborations around Replaying Japan. We hope to build collaborations around artificial intelligence, games, learning, and digital humanities. KIAS and the AI4Society signature area have been supporting this research collaboration.

Today (March 2nd, 2023) we are having a short conference at Ritsumeikan that included a panel about our collaboration, at which I talked, and a showcase of research in game studies at Ritsumeikan.

Ottawa’s use of our location data raises big surveillance and privacy concerns

In order to track the pandemic, the Public Health Agency of Canada has been using location data without explicit and informed consent. Transparency is key to building and maintaining trust.

The Conversation has just published an article on  Ottawa’s use of our location data raises big surveillance and privacy concerns. This was written with a number of colleagues who were part of a research retreat (Dagstuhl) on Mobility Data Analysis: from Technical to Ethical.

We are at a moment when ethical principles are really not enough and we need to start talking about best practices in order to develop a culture of ethical use of data.

Replaying Japan 2021

Yesterday (Friday the 13th of August) we finished the 5th day of the Replaying Japan 2021 conference. The conference was organized by the AI for Society Signature Area, the Kule Institute for Advanced Study, and the Prince Takamado Japan Centre all at the University of Alberta.

At the conference I organized a roundtable about the Replaying Japan conference itself titled “Ten Years of Dialogue: Reflecting on Replaying Japan.” I moderated the discussion and started with a brief history that I quote from here:

The Replaying Japan conference will have been going now for ten years if you include its predecessor symposium that was held in 2012 in Edmonton, Canada.

The encounter around Japanese Game Culture came out of the willingness of Ritsumeikan University to host Geoffrey Rockwell as a Japan Foundation Japan Studies Fellow in Kyoto in 2011. While Rockwell worked closely with researchers like Prof. INABA at the Ritsumeikan Digital Humanities Centre for Japanese Arts and Culture, he also got to meet Professors Nakamura and Koichi at the Ritsumeikan Centre for Game Studies. Out of these conversations it became clear that game studies in the West and game studies in Japan were not in conversation. The research communities were siloes working in their own languages that didn’t intermingle much. We agreed that we needed to try to bridge the communities and organized a first small symposium in 2012 in Edmonton with support from the Prince Takamado Japan Centre at the University of Alberta. At a meeting right after the symposium we developed the idea for a conference that could go back and forth between Japan and the West called Replaying Japan. Initially the conference just went back and forth between Kyoto and Edmonton, but we soon started going to Europe and the USA which expanded the network.

(From the abstract for the roundtable)

At the conference I was also part two papers that were presented others:

  1. Keiji Amano presented on “The Rise and Fall of Popular Amusement: Operation Invader Shoot Down.” This paper looked at Nagoya tabloids and how they described the explosion of Space Invaders as a threat to the pachinko industry.
  2. Mimi Okabe presented on “Moral Management in Japanese Game Companies” which discussed how certain Japanese game companies manager their ethical reputation. We looked as specific issues like forced labour in the supply chain, gender issues, and work-life balance.

You can see the conference Schedule here.