Author Archives: Claudio Coletta

Seminar – Smart Cities and the Secret Life of Objects. (In)Visibility at Glasgow, Curitiba and Bristol’s initiatives.

Leave a reply

We are delighted to welcome Dr. André Lemos to Maynooth on Wednesday 25th November at 3pm, Iontas Building, room 2.31 for the second of our Programmable City seminars this semester.

Dr. André Lemos has a PhD in Sociology (Université René Descartes, Paris V, Sorbonne, 1995), and is a Full Professor and the Director of Lab404 – Digital Media, Networks and Space Lab at Faculty of Communication, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil. He is presently a visiting scholar at NIRSA, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, with a research grant from CAPES Foundation (Brazilian Ministry of Education). His research is on cultural and communicational aspects of objects on Smart Cities, Internet of Things and Big Data initiatives.

The session will introduce the topics of invisibility of info-communicational objects in smart city initiatives. It will focus on the social/political dimensions of digital objects’ invisibility in everyday life, showing how they mediate and act upon human experience.

ProgCity_Seminar_3_2_AndreLemos

John Danaher – The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation

Leave a reply

On November 2nd Dr. John Danaher visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on Algocracy, providing a juridical and philosophical perspective on how algorithms affect the legitimacy of decision-making processes.

The talk was extremely well-received, and this video of the event offers an account of the agency of algorithms, their threats, opacity and the possible ways to resist and “accommodate” them.

Seminar – The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation

Leave a reply

We are delighted to welcome Dr. John Danaher to Maynooth on Monday 2nd November at 3pm, Iontas Building room 2.31 for the first of our Programmable City seminars this semester.

Dr. John Danaher is a lecturer in Law at NUI Galway. His research interests lie, broadly, in the areas of philosophy of law and emerging technologies and law. In the past, he has published articles on human enhancement, brain-based lie detection, the philosophy of punishment and artificial intelligence. He maintains a blog called Philosophical Disquisitions, and he also writes for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

The session will introduce the topic of algorithmic decision-making, exploring the issues related to use of such decision-making in the public sphere is problematic and to how it affects the moral and political legitimacy of the decision-making process.

ProgCity_Seminar_3_1_JohnDanaher