Dhanaraj Thakur — Finding the Sweet Spot: Working At The Intersection Between Research and Technology Policy
From Tim Trent
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From Tim Trent
How can we design research that informs technology policy debates?
How can research help advance human rights advocacy in those debates?
And at the same time how can that research be novel and offer a contribution to the field?
These are some of the factors that guide research in advocacy organizations. In this talk I will discuss some of the ways we address these challenges drawing on practical experiences as well as my research. I will refer to our research in three broad areas - content moderation, surveillance, and disinformation. Specifically, I will share our experiences addressing problems such as detecting harmful content in end-to-end encrypted messaging services, understanding the extent to which school issued devices monitor students and in what ways, and an ongoing project examining the potentially disproportionate impacts of disinformation on women of color political candidates in the U.S. These diverse examples will also demonstrate how we bring together interdisciplinary teams of researchers to tackle these problems and how we create spaces for researchers and policy-makers to learn from each other.