Category: Uncategorized
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OpenPrecincts: Can Citizen Science Improve Gerrymandering Reform?
How the American public understand gerrymandering and collect data that could lead to fairer, more representative voting districts across the US? Speaking today at CITP are Ben Williams and Hannah Wheelen of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
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BMDs are not meaningfully auditable
The 2019 article described here was later revised and published in a peer-reviewed journal as, Ballot-Marking Devices Cannot Assure the Will of the Voters, by Andrew W. Appel, Richard A. DeMillo, and Philip B. Stark. Election Law Journal, vol. 19 no. 3, pp. 432-450, September 2020. (Non-paywall version, differs in formatting and pagination). This paper has just…
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CITP Call for Visitors for 2019-20
The Center for Information Technology Policy is an interdisciplinary research center at Princeton University that sits at the crossroads of engineering, the social sciences, law, and policy. CITP seeks applicants for various visiting positions each year. Visitors are expected to live in or near Princeton and to be in residence at CITP on a daily basis. They…
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CITP to Launch Tech Policy Clinic; Hiring Clinic Lead
We’re excited to announce the CITP technology policy clinic, a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary project to engage students and scholars directly in the policy process. The clinic will be supported by a generous alumni gift. The technology policy clinic will adapt the law school clinic model to involve scholars at all levels in real-world policy activities related…
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How to constructively review a research paper
Any piece of research can be evaluated on three axes: Correctness/validity — are the claims justified by evidence? Impact/significance — how will the findings affect the research field (and the world)? Novelty/originality — how big a leap are the ideas, especially the methods, compared to what was already known? There are additional considerations such as…
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Roundup: My First Semester as a Post-Doc at Princeton
As Princeton thaws from under last week’s snow hurricane, I’m taking a moment to reflect on my first four months in the place I now call home. This roundup post shares highlights from my first semester as a post-doc in Psychology, CITP, and Sociology. So far, I have had an amazing experience: The Paluck Lab…
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What does it mean to ask for an “explainable” algorithm?
One of the standard critiques of using algorithms for decision-making about people, and especially for consequential decisions about access to housing, credit, education, and so on, is that the algorithms don’t provide an “explanation” for their results or the results aren’t “interpretable.” This is a serious issue, but discussions of it are often frustrating. The reason,…
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RIP, SHA-1
Today’s cryptography news is that researchers have discovered a collision in the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function. Though long-expected, this is a notable milestone in the evolution of crypto standards. Kudos to Marc Stevens, Elie Bursztein, Pierre Karpma, Ange Albertine, and Yarik Markov of CWI Amsterdam and Google Research for their result. SHA-1 was standardized by…
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Smart Contracts: Neither Smart nor Contracts?
Karen Levy has an interesting new article critiquing blockchain-based “smart contracts.” The first part of her title, “Book-Smart, not Street-Smart,” sums up her point. Here’s a snippet: Though smart contracts do have some features that might serve the goals of social justice and fairness, I suggest that they are based on a thin conception of…
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CITP Call for Visitors and Affiliates for 2017-18
The Center for Information Technology Policy is an interdisciplinary research center at Princeton that sits at the crossroads of engineering, the social sciences, law, and policy. We are seeking applicants for various residential visiting positions and for non-residential affiliates. For more information about these positions, please see our general information page and yearly call for…