Sociotechs Silvia Masiero and Tejas Kotha

The foundational elements of EU migration policies and security technologies started to take a turn in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, accelerating the research and use of traditional military and war technologies such as drones in civilian border management. In this episode, we explore the role of drones in border studies, the evolving landscape of EU border technologies in the wake of AI, and how these security problems and solutions are co-produced in the frameworks of migration policies with Bruno Oliveira Martins.

Bruno is a senior researcher at Peach Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where he is co-leader of the Security & Technology Research Group and a member of the PRIO Migration Centre. His research is centered on the intricate dynamics of security solutions and their implications for border management and those affected by it.

Resources:

Martins, Bruno Oliveira & Michael Strange (2019) Rethinking EU external migration policy: contestation and critique, Global Affairs 5 (3): 195–202.

Martins, Bruno Oliveira & Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert (2020) EU Border technologies and the co-production of security ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1851470.

Health data governance should ensure protection for individuals' health data against violations, while enabling the smooth functioning of healthcare systems. Doing so involves a complex set of stakeholders, opening multiple questions which directly affect the way our health data are collected, stored and managed. Today we sit with Dragana Paparova to unpack such questions, learning about issues and practices at the heart of health data governance. 



Dragana Paparova is a postdoctoral researcher in Information Systems at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. Her research is centred on the production, sharing and usage of patient (generated) healthcare data across stakeholders and organisational boundaries. She holds a PhD from University of Agder, and her paper "Data Hierarchies: The Emergence of an Industrial Data Ecosystem", coauthored with Daniel S. Svendsrud, was runner-up for Best Student Paper Award at ICIS 2023.



Resources:

Paparova, D. (2024). Data spaces and the (trans) formations of data innovation and governance. Doctoral dissertations at University of Agder, https://uia.brage.unit.no/uia-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/3112105/Dissertation.pdf?sequence=4

Paparova, D., Aanestad, M., Vassilakopoulou, P., & Bahus, M. K. (2023). Data governance spaces: the case of a national digital service for personal health data. Information and Organization, 33(1), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471772723000052

Svendsrud, D. S., & Paparova, D. (2023). Data Hierarchies: The Emergence of an Industrial Data Ecosystem. International Conference of Information Systems (2023) Proceedings, https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/diginnoventren/diginnoventren/14.

The narrative of digital deception pervades the discourse on generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), opening important questions on the validity and verifiability of the information we come across daily. In this landscape, generative AI is now being extensively used to create engaging bots on social media which poses several threats to the fabric of trust and safety we as users expect over the internet. Today we sit with Sippo Rossi to unpack the nature of such problems, how we as users of social media can remain vigilant and its implications on future research on this topic.



Sippo Rossi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. He is soon to graduate with his PhD from the Department of Digitalization at the Copenhagen Business School, and during his studies, he contributed to research on bot detection on X, formerly Twitter, and the use of AI in research.



Resources:

Rossi, S., Rossi, M., Mukkamala, R. R., Thatcher, J. B., & Dwivedi, Y. K. (2024). Augmenting research methods with foundation models and generative AI. International Journal of Information Management, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401223001305.

Rossi, S., Kwon, Y., Auglend, O. H., Mukkamala, R. R., Rossi, M., & Thatcher, J. (2022). Are Deep Learning-Generated Social Media Profiles Indistinguishable from Real Profiles?., Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07214. 

Rossi, S., Rossi, M., Upreti, B. R., & Liu, Y. (2020). Detecting political bots on Twitter during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary election. In T. X. Bui (Ed.), Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2020 (pp. 2430-2439). http://hdl.handle.net/10125/64040

Humanitarian aid has undergone significant transformations in recent years, driven in part by the increasing integration of technology and the growing influence of private partners. Such a development not just changes who the actors are also, the mindset and response these actors bring for such an important ecosystem. We sit with Giulio Coppi to understand the principles of humanitarian aid, how digital technologies have been employed and the increasing influence of private players.

Giulio Coppi is a senior humanitarian officer at Access Now. Access Now is an organization that defends and extends the digital rights of people and communities at risk. Giulio has been an advocate for open and fair humanitarian technologies and is currently involved in a landscape mapping project to observe the emerging patterns increased private actors in the space.

The notion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for social good is being actively pushed as a route to involve private tech vendors in the pursuit of targets ascribing to the Sustainable Development Goals. With our guest Gianluca Iazzolino, we discuss the implications of the "AI for Social Good" (AI4SG) logic for intended providers and beneficiaries, with a focus on Africa. From biometric databases to large-scale monitoring infrastructures, the discussion unravels the problematic implications of the AI4SG discourse in the African context.

Gianluca Iazzolino is a Lecturer in Digital Development at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. He uses ethnographic methods to explore the precarious balance of inclusion and surveillance that characterizes most digital development initiatives. His research works can be accessed on Researchgate.

Sources: Iazzolino, G. (2021). Infrastructure of compassionate repression: making sense of biometrics in Kakuma refugee camp. Information Technology for Development, 27(1), 111-128.

At a time when machines undertake practices previously delegated to human expertise, questions of skill erosion become prominent. Our guests Esko Penttinen and Joona Ruissalo illuminate the intersections of automation and skill erosion, which denotes a situation of decline in people's ability to manage tasks with the same effectiveness as before. With rich empirics from the accounting sector, they share insights on how the "grip of automation" interacts with skill erosion, and on the meaning of this for the lived experience of workers in the sector.



Esko Penttinen is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at Aalto University, Department of Information and Service Management. Joona Ruissalo is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the same Department, focusing on cognitive automation in the accounting industry.



Sources:
Rinta-Kahila, Tapani; Penttinen, Esko; Salovaara, Antti; Soliman, Wael; and Ruissalo, Joona (2023) "The Vicious Circles of Skill Erosion: A Case Study of Cognitive Automation," Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 24(5), 1378-1412.DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00829Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol24/iss5/2