The elderly victim of an attack feels empty after winning justice from a “panel of metal judges” in a future courtroom beyond human biases.

An online karate class is taught by artificial intelligence and robots, but over the decades, even as the sport thrives, much of its crucial human element is forgotten.

These tales of AI and its effects on future life — and many more, from points around the world — are gathered in “,” presented by the 91̽»¨ . The lab is an interdisciplinary collaboration of the 91̽»¨Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Information School and School of Law, to “enhance technology policy through research, education and thoughtful leadership.”

Together, the 19 stories are meant to ask: “What world — what worlds? — will we build with artificial intelligence?” The stories were written by authors all over the world and edited by a five-member 91̽»¨team led by Information School professor , law school professor and computer science and engineering professor , who are the directors of the Tech Policy Lab. Joining them in editing were , an iSchool doctoral student, and , an alumna of the lab.

The volume, which is available free in , is intended for policymakers, educators and technologists as well as general readers. Authors in Canada, Chile, China, India, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and more submitted work.

Calo, Friedman and Kohno all penned stories for the book, as did Darren Byler, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology. The tales are fiction — though at least one stems from a real-world scenario. Friedman’s entry about a futuristic court, called “What Justice,” evolved from her years of work on the project, investigating the grim realities of genocide in that country.

The “Telling Stories” project grew from the Tech Policy Lab’s Global Summit on Culturally Responsive AI, underway since 2016, convening 20 to 30 scholars representing design, ethics, governance, policy and technology. The lab’s 2018 Global Summit focused on “grand challenges for developing and disseminating artificial intelligence technologies that maintain respect for and enhance culture and diversity of worldview.”

Participants to that summit brought pieces of fabric meaningful to their culture, which then sparked enactments, storytelling and conversations. “Telling Stories” employs the wisdom from these talks, and the resulting tales are meant for retelling.

In a story by law professor Ian Kerr of the University of Ottawa (who died in 2019 and to whom the volume is dedicated), one character borrows words from late astronomer Carl Sagan that seem to speak to the technological dilemmas at hand:

“We are creating world-altering contrivances and we have choices to make. We can relinquish control and roll the bones in a strange game of digital Russian roulette. Or we can rely on the bright light of human wisdom to place limits on what may and must not be done, and safely pass through times of peril.”

A hardcover edition of “Telling Stories” will be available in May through the University Bookstore.

For more information, contact Calo at rcalo@uw.edu, Friedman at batya@uw.edu or Kohno at yoshi@cs.washington.edu.

American Astronomical Society honors UW’s Emily Levesque for early career achievement

The American Astronomical Society has named , 91̽»¨assistant professor of astronomy, recipient of its 2020 , given for outstanding early career achievement in observational astronomy.

Levesque was honored, more specifically, for her “breakthrough studies of massive stars and their explosive end states.

“Through observations of the host galaxy environments of long-duration gamma-ray bursts she has provided new insights into the stellar populations that create these extremely energetic events,” the AAS said in its . Levesque also led development of a new temperature scale for stars. She wrote a graduate-level e- on the subject in 2017, and is working on a new for the general public about observational astronomy, coming in August.

The is named for American astronomer . This is Levesque’s second honor from the AAS; in 2014 she received the for outstanding research and promise for future research by a postdoctoral woman researcher.

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Social work professor Karen Fredriksen Goldsen named to Washington state LGBTQ Commission

Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee has named of the 91̽»¨School of Social work one of 15 members to serve on the state’s new LGBTQ Commission.

Fredriksen Goldsen is a professor of social work and director of the at the UW.

All the commission members were chosen by the governor with input from members of the state House and Senate as well as from community stakeholders. The commissioners will serve three-year staggered appointments, and all are effective immediately. The was made Jan. 16.

The LGBTQ Commission was established by the state Legislature and signed into law by Inslee in April 2019. The commission is tasked with identifying the needs of the LGBTQ community and advocating for equity and inclusion throughout Washington state government.

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Information School professor Batya Friedman receives honorary doctorate from Delft University of Technology

, professor in the Information School, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from , in Delft, Netherlands.

The honor was one of two given to researchers who “symbolize new perceptions in design” during , the Dutch school’s 178^th anniversary celebration, on Jan. 10. Friedman gave a keynote lecture during the event’s Program Design for Values .

Friedman is founder and co-director, with iSchool colleague , of the UW’s . The two also co-wrote the 2019 book “.”

Value sensitive design, the two wrote, “brings together theory, methods and applications for a design process that engages human values at every stage.”

In the ceremony, Delft professor Ibo van de Poel praised Friedman as a pioneer: “In 1996, you for the first time used the term value sensitive design in a publication … Now, 20 years later the approach has been adopted world-wide.”

Watch a of the Dies Natalis event (Friedman appears at about the 55:35 mark).

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English Department’s Expository Writing Program wins national honor

The Department of English’s has been awarded a certificate of excellence by the nationwide .

The program is directed by , 91̽»¨associate professor of English. Other associate directors and mentors, noted in the department , are , , , , and .

The awards committee wrote that they were impressed by the program’s “expansive” vision of writing, including its “attentiveness to the needs of diverse learners, including its support for multilingual writers, and its integration of anti-racism into professional development opportunities.”

The newsletter also noted the contribution former program directors, including , , and .

Recent notable books by 91̽»¨ faculty members explore how the U.S. government has historically used credit to create opportunity, how “reproductive slavery” has left lasting ramifications, and how technology design benefits from human values.

Information School’s Friedman, Hendry co-author ‘Value Sensitive Design’

and , faculty members in the 91̽»¨, have co-authored the new book “

With technology affecting all aspects of life and the growing concerns over privacy, security and inclusion, the authors ask: “How should designers, engineers, architects, policymakers, and others design such technology? Who should be involved and what values are implicated?”

Value Sensitive design “brings together theory, methods and applications for a design process that engages human values at every stage.” And its methods, they write, “in short, catalyze moral and technical imaginations for design and engineering.”

With heightened awareness of bias in artificial intelligence systems and its negative social and economic impacts, the authors add: “Value sensitive design stands out as an approach that helps position engineers and technologists to get on the front end of these problems before systems are developed and deployed.”

The book offers 17 concrete methods for value sensitive design, they write, and demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach “through case studies from large-scale public transportation to security for implantable medical devices.

Friedman and Hendry cite social media and artificial intelligence as examples of technologies that would benefit from value sensitive design. Social media companies, in favoring young adult users, “tend not to consider other key stakeholders such as children and the elderly,” and AI systems are often inscrutable “black boxes” of automatic decision making.

“Value sensitive design offers concrete approaches and methods for broadening the focus of AI systems, away from a singular focus on efficiency to responsible innovation and such values as fairness and lack of bias, diverse stakeholder inclusion, and most broadly social justice.”

“Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination” was published in May by MIT Press.

For more information, contact Friedman at batya@uw.edu or Hendry at dhendry@uw.edu

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‘American Bonds’: Creating opportunity through government credit

In her book “,” 91̽»¨associate professor of sociology explores how the United States government has long used financial credit programs to create economic opportunities for American citizens.

Though federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities became well known in the 2008 financial crisis, publisher’s notes for “American Bonds” say, government credit has been part of American life since the nation’s founding.

“From the 1780s, when a watershed national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, ‘American Bonds’ examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs.”

Since westward expansion, Quinn argues, the U.S. government has used financial markets to manage the nation’s social divides, and politicians and officials of all political stripes have used land sales, home ownership and credit “to provide economic opportunity without the appearance of market intervention or direct wealth redistribution.”

Government credit programs supported the growth of industries, helped with disaster relief, foreign policy and military efforts “and were promoters of amortized mortgages, lending abroad, venture capital investment and mortgage securitization.”

“American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation” is being published this month by Princeton University Press.

For more information, contact Quinn at slquinn@uw.edu.

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‘State of being stateless’: Juliet Shields co-edits volume on migrants in 18^th, 19^th centuries

, 91̽»¨professor of English, is co-editor, with of Central Michigan University, of a book of essays titled “.” Publishers notes say the volume “initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.”

Migrants have often existed “historically in the murky spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities.” The essays “traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined” of such migrants, and “explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others.”

“These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.”

“Migration and Modernities” was published in January by Edinburgh University Press.

For more information, contact Shields at js37@uw.edu

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Biocapitalism, black feminism and the ‘commodification of the human reproductive body’

In her book, “,” 91̽»¨English professor examines “the continuing resonances of Atlantic slavery in the cultures and politics of human reproduction that characterize contemporary biocapitalism.”

Biocapitalism is a form of racial capitalism that relies on the commodification of the human reproductive body, its parts and its biological processes. It is dependent on what Weinbaum calls the “slave episteme — the radical logic that drove four centuries of slave breeding in the Americas and Caribbean.”

Weinbaum uses texts from Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” to Octavia Butler’s dystopian fiction, from Marxist theory to histories of slavery and legal cases of surrogacy to show how “the slave episteme continues to affect reproduction today, especially through the use of biotechnology and surrogacy.”

Black feminist contributions from the 1970s through the 1990s, she argues, “constitute a powerful philosophy of history — one that provides the means through which to understand how reproductive slavery haunts the present.”

“The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery” was published in March by Duke University Press.

For more information, contact Weinbaum at alysw@uw.edu.

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History professor Bet-Shlimon writes of Kirkuk in new book ‘City of Black Gold’

, 91̽»¨assistant professor of history, tells of Iraq’s most multilingual city and the historic heart of its powerful petroleum industry in her new book, “.”

It was 1927 when a foreign company first struck oil in Kirkuk, which had for millennia been home to a diverse population. “City of Black Gold,” publisher’s notes say, “tells a story of oil, urbanization and colonialism in Kirkuk — and how these factors shaped the identities of Kirkuk’s citizens, forming the foundation of an ethnic conflict.

“Ultimately, this book shows how contentious politics in disputed areas are not primordial traits of those regions, but are a modern phenomenon tightly bound to the society and economics of urban life.”

“City of Black Gold” was published in May by Stanford University Press.

For more information, contact Bet-Shlimon at shlimon@uw.edu

is the enhancement of human perception through overlaying technologies that can expand, annotate and even record the user’s moment-to-moment experience.

Those designing coming augmented reality systems should make them adaptable to change, resistant to hacking and responsive to the needs of diverse users, according to a white paper by an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the 91̽»¨’s .

Though still in its relative infancy, augmented reality promises systems that can aid people with mobility or other limitations, providing real-time information about their immediate environment as well as hands-free obstacle avoidance, language translation, instruction and much more. From enhanced eyewear like Google Glass to Microsoft’s wearable HoloLens system, tech, gaming and advertisement industries are already investing in and deploying augmented reality devices and systems.

But augmented reality will also bring challenges for law, public policy and privacy, especially pertaining to how information is collected and displayed. Issues regarding surveillance and privacy, free speech, safety, intellectual property and distraction — as well as potential discrimination — are bound to follow.

The Tech Policy Lab brings together faculty and students from the , and and other campus units to think through issues of technology policy. “” is the lab’s first official white paper aimed at a policy audience. The paper is based in part on research presented at the 2015 , or UbiComp conference.

, assistant professor of law and Tech Policy Lab co-director, is lead author together with of the Information School and and of computer science and engineering. Other co-authors are Emily McReynolds, 91̽»¨Tech Policy Lab associate director; Tamara Denning, who graduated from the 91̽»¨in computer science and engineering and is now an assistant professor at the University of Utah; Bryce Newell, who graduated from the 91̽»¨Information School and is now a postdoctoral researcher the University of Tilburg; Information School doctoral student Lassana Magassa and School of Law alumnus Jesse Woo.

The researchers used a method of work designed by the Tech Policy Lab for evaluating new technologies, first conferring with those in the computer science field to define augmented reality as precisely as possible. Then they look to the humanities and social sciences — information science, in this case — to consider the impact of the technology in question on various end users. They called these “diversity panels.”

Magassa, who organized the diversity panels, said they help to ensure that underrepresented groups are highlighted in a way that makes sense to those that develop technology and its governing policies.

“They also are important in that they increase the likelihood that the people who develop such policies get to hear and consider alternate points of view, concerns and visions as they design and develop technology policies,” he said.

The researchers sorted issues raised by augmented reality into basic categories: those relating to the collection of information, and those relating to its display.

• The collection of information raises issues that include a reasonable expectation of privacy, the First Amendment right to free speech, intellectual property and the relaying of information to third parties.

• The display of information in augmented reality systems prompted questions about harm caused by errors or negligence, product liability and potential discrimination or even digital assault.

The group arrived at a set of recommendations for policymakers that “do not purport to advance any particular vision, but rather provide guidance that can be used to inform the policymaking process.”

Their recommendations, briefly put, were:

Build dynamic systems: Augmented reality systems should be flexible and capable of being updated to reflect changes both technological and cultural, to remain relevant.

Conduct “threat modeling”: Hackers beat systems by finding behaviors that designers didn’t anticipate. Systems should be reviewed with an eye toward who might wish to compromise the system and how. This is particularly important because breeches of augmented reality systems could lead to physical harm.

Coordinate with designers: No technology policy should be made in isolation. Designers may not fully appreciate the legal import of a project and policymakers need to understand the technology in order to make wise decisions.

Consult with diverse potential users: People will use augmented reality in different ways depending on their own experiences and skills. Those planning such systems should consult with diverse populations, and solicit and use their feedback.

Acknowledge trade-offs: Systems open to third-party analysis or additions might promote greater freedom and innovation, but at the cost of harm through malicious applications or coding. Long-term storage, cloud processing or other advanced data processes might give faster performance at the cost of privacy.

Calo called the interdisciplinary analysis of augmented reality law and policy concerns difficult but crucial work.

“We had to come up with a process to blend the technical, legal, design and other elements into a single policy document,” he said. “I hope the finished document proves useful to policymakers of all kinds.”

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For more information, contact Calo at rcalo@uw.edu or 206-543-1580. Follow Calo on Twitter at .