Related papers: Roles for Computing in Social Change
Human societies continuously transform scattered information into collective judgments and coordinated action, whether through markets discovering prices, governments allocating resources, communities enforcing norms, or science converging…
Climate change is an existential threat to the United States and the world. Inevitably, computing will play a key role in mitigation, adaptation, and resilience in response to this threat. The needs span all areas of computing, from devices…
As belief around the potential of computational social science grows, fuelled by recent advances in machine learning, data scientists are ostensibly becoming the new experts in education. Scholars engaged in critical studies of education…
The computing research community needs to work much harder to address the downsides of our innovations. Between the erosion of privacy, threats to democracy, and automation's effect on employment (among many other issues), we can no longer…
Quantum computing promises to help humanity solve problems that would otherwise be intractable on classical computers. Unlike today's machines, quantum computers use a novel computing process that leverages the foundational quantum…
Studying corruption presents unique challenges. Recent work in the spirit of computational social science exploits newly available data and methods to give a fresh perspective on this important topic. In this chapter we highlight some of…
Computation, the use of a computer to solve, simulate, or visualize a physical problem, has revolutionized how physics research is done. Computation is used widely to model systems, to simulate experiments, and to analyze data. Yet, in most…
Computing is an indispensable component of nearly all technologies and is ubiquitous for vast segments of society. It is also essential to discoveries and innovations in most disciplines. However, while past grand challenges in science have…
This paper explores how different ideas of racial equity in machine learning, in justice settings in particular, can present trade-offs that are difficult to solve computationally. Machine learning is often used in justice settings to…
Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems: crowdsourcing systems, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, citizen science projects, and collaboratively edited…
Over the past decade, an explosion in the availability of education-related datasets has enabled new computational research in education. Much of this work has investigated digital traces of online learners in order to better understand and…
Over the past six decades, the computing systems field has experienced significant transformations, profoundly impacting society with transformational developments, such as the Internet and the commodification of computing. Underpinned by…
From smart sensors that infringe on our privacy to neural nets that portray realistic imposter deepfakes, our society increasingly bears the burden of negative, if unintended, consequences of computing innovations. As the experts in the…
Modern society is permeated with computers, and the software that controls them can have latent, long-term, and immediate effects that reach far beyond the actual users of these systems. This places researchers in Computer Science and…
The computing ecosystem has always had deep impacts on society and technology and profoundly changed our lives in myriads of ways. Despite decades of impressive Moore's Law performance scaling and other growth in the computing ecosystem…
Uncovering the structure of socioeconomic systems and timely estimation of socioeconomic status are significant for economic development. The understanding of socioeconomic processes provides foundations to quantify global economic…
Computing is a critical driving force in the development of human civilization. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of intelligent computing, a new computing paradigm that is reshaping traditional computing and promoting…
The belief that AI technology is on the cusp of causing a generalized social crisis became a popular one in 2023. While there was no doubt an element of hype and exaggeration to some of these accounts, they do reflect the fact that there…
The ubiquitous presence of computer simulations in all kinds of research areas evidence their role as the new driving force for the advancement of science and engineering research. Nothing seems to escape the image of success that computer…
There are pronounced differences in the extent to which industrial and academic AI labs use computing resources. We provide a data-driven survey of the role of the compute divide in shaping machine learning research. We show that a compute…