Online platforms, which monitor and intervene in the lives of billions of people, routinely host thousands of experiments to evaluate policies, test products, and contribute to theory in the social sciences. These experiments are also powerful tools to monitor injustice and govern human and algorithm behavior. How can we do field experiments at scale, reliably, […]
Building Respectful Products using Crypto: Lea Kissner at CITP
October 4, 2018 by
How can we build respect into products and systems? What role does cryptography play in respectful design? Speaking today at CITP is Lea Kissner (@LeaKissner), global lead of Privacy Technology at Google. Lea has spent the last 11 years designing and building security and privacy for Google projects from the grittiest layers of infrastructure to […]
How can we scale private, smart contracts? Ed Felten on Arbitrum
September 24, 2018 by
Smart contracts are powerful virtual referees for holding money and carrying out agreed-on procedures in cases of disputes, but they can’t guarantee privacy and have strict scalability limitations. How can we improve on these constraints? Here at the Center for IT Policy, it’s the first event of our weekly Tuesday lunch series. Speaking today is […]
Can Classes on Field Experiments Scale? Lessons from SOC412
July 16, 2018 by
Last semester, I taught a Princeton undergrad/grad seminar on the craft, politics, and ethics of behavioral experimentation. The idea was simple: since large-scale human subjects research is now common outside universities, we need to equip students to make sense of that kind of power and think critically about it. In this post, I share lessons for teaching […]
Teaching the Craft, Ethics, and Politics of Field Experiments
July 3, 2018 by
How can we manage the politics and ethics of large-scale online behavioral research? When this question came up in April during a forum on Defending Democracy at Princeton, Ed Felten mentioned on stage that I was teaching a Princeton undergrad class on this very topic. No pressure! Ed was right about the need: people with […]
