Our Work
Information sharing has become a central concern for security agencies since 9/11. Drawing on ideas from the sociology of information and trust, this article adapts Ericson’s framework of rule-following to an Australian case study to frame the sharing/withholding of information between agencies as dependent on rules as a system of trust.
Read MoreThis book analyses counterradicalisation policy in the US and the UK in the context of the concept of political community. Adapting citizenship theory and literature on state formation and drawing on interviews with senior counterterrorism policymakers, it provides a detailed history of these policy measures in both jurisdictions.
Read MoreThis chapter is an overview of the use of algorithms in government decision-making, and particularly of the legal issues which arise as a result. The chapter moves from a description of the use of automation in government to a discussion of its effect on core rule of law values.
Read MoreThis chapter, by Peggy Valcke, Damian Clifford, and Viltė Kristina Steponėnaitė, will appear in Constitutional Challenges in the Algorithmic Society, Giovanni De Gregorio et al. (eds) (Forthcoming CUP). It discusses legal-ethical challenges posed by the emergence of emotional artificial intelligence (AI) and its manipulative capabilities.
Read MoreThis paper is about how an agent should rationally update her probabilistic beliefs when her conceptual space (modelled as an algebra of propositions) grows. This is not like typical cases of learning, which are cases in which an agent comes to revise her beliefs for propositions about which she was already aware. We investigate whether the learning rules for the typical cases of learning can be extended to the case of conceptual growth.
Read MoreHere HMI CI Katie Steele argues that on a certain way of modelling an agent's preferences and understanding her "time preferences", exponential time discounting is uniquely rational. However, if "time preferences" are understood differently, then exponential time discounting is not uniquely rational. This helps in understanding why the prescription of exponential time discounting has many defenders but also many detractors.
Read MoreSome realistic models of neural spiking take into account spike timing, yet the practical relevance of spike timing is often unclear. I show that polychronous networks reflect a distinct organisational principle from notions of pluripotency, redundancy, or re-use, and argue that properly understanding this phenomenon requires a shift to a time-sensitive, process-based view of computation.
Read MoreThis article discusses personal data, personal information, internet of things, and consumer law.
Read MoreThere has long been debate within the scholarly literature around the role and the limits of consent in promoting welfare enhancing outcomes and the need for consent-based gate-keeping mechanisms to be supplemented by other protections. Moves to bolster consent within the field of consumer privacy, and indeed, the criticisms of relying on it, should be couched within this broader literature.
Read MoreThis book offers a conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective for the analysis and design of sociotechnical systems.
Read MoreThis paper is a collaboration between HMI, IAG and Gradient, and reflects our broader concern that new methods that use machine learning to influence risk predictions to determine insurance premiums won't be able to distinguish between risks the costs of which people should bear themselves, and those that should be redistributed across the broader population, and might also involve using data points that it is intrinsically wrong to use for this purpose.
Read MoreThis paper examines the epistemic value of using topological methods to study the "shape" of data sets. It is argued that the category theoretic notion of "functoriality" aids in translating visual intuitions about structure in data into precise, computable descriptions of real-world systems.
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