School of Information
 Previously School of Library & Information Studies

 Friday Afternoon Seminar: Summaries.
  296a-1 Seminar: Information Access, Spring 2024.

Fridays 3-5. Everyone interested is welcome. Details are added as they become available.
In person, with also Zoom -- unless indicated otherwise. Campus policy requires all Zoom participants to sign into a Zoom account prior to joining meetings hosted by UC Berkeley. Face mask recommended but not required for in-person attendance. Zoom sessions are not recorded.
Zoom link available only at the School's Seminar event listing: www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/ias.
Schedule. Weekly mailing list.

Aug 30: *No Seminar meeting.*

Sep 6: Michael BUCKLAND: Relevance, Expressions and Context.

    Last semester I presented a narrow definition of the problematic notion of "relevance" and a descriptive "linear" model. Extending that work leads to a comparable model of expressions (signs, documents). Relating the two models yields descriptive models of scholarship, persuasion, and both personal and communal knowledge. It also invites attention to the concept of "context". This is joint work with Wayne de Fremery. Our published definition and linear model of relevance has been published as: Relevance and creativity — A linear model.

Sep 13: Eric MEYER, Dean: Knowledge Machines and Beyond: Digital Transformations of Scholarship.
    In 2015, Eric Meyer and Ralph Schroeder published Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities. The book was “an examination of the ways that digital and networked technologies have fundamentally changed research practices in disciplines from astronomy to literary analysis.” The book summarizes the e-Research and e-Science era in the U.K., U.S., and elsewhere which dominated from roughly 2000-2010, and the shift toward ‘big data’ in the first half of the 2010s. This talk will present a summary of that work, but also reflect on more recent changes wrought by machine learning, LLMs, and other advanced computational techniques that continue to shape scholarship. Participants wishing to read the book can access the e-book through the MIT Press Backfile via the UC Berkeley libraries.
    Eric Meyer joined the School as Dean and professor on August 1. More at New Dean.

Sep 20: Jeffery HART: Hollywood Goes Digital: How Technology is Changing the Movie Industry.
    A number of digital technologies have reshaped the movie industry: e.g., DVDs, digital cameras, digital post-production, and online streaming services via the Internet. The COVID pandemic resulted in a major shift away from going to theaters toward viewing content at home. Digital libraries of films have become a major source of revenues for what used to be called movie studios. What are the implications of these changes for the future of the industry?
    Jeffrey A. Hart is an emeritus professor of political science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His main area of specialization is international political economy. Most of his research has been on the politics of international economic competitiveness in the advanced industrial nations. Between 1996 and 2001, he collaborated with Stefanie Lenway and Tom Murtha on the global flat panel display industry, supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2001, he completed a project on globalization in collaboration with Aseem Prakash that resulted in the publication of three edited volumes. In 2004, he published a book on the politics of high definition television (HDTV). He co-authored three editions of a textbook with Joan Edelman Spero (The Politics of International Economic Relations). His most recent book was Essays on the History and Politics of the Internet (2023).

Sep 27: Combined with the School's 106th Birthday Celebration in South Hall 202.
    In 1918, UC Berkeley began a full-time program in library science, the direct ancestor of the present school. See 106th Birthday Celebration.

Oct 4: Letters from Tokyo, 1950-1956 and Students' Reports.
    Michael BUCKLAND: Robert Gitler's Letters from Tokyo, 1950-1956.

    In 1950 the American Library Association sent our alumnus Robert Gitler '31 to Japan on a vague mission to establish a library school. With a modest grant and great dedication he rather improbably succeeded. Today his Japan Library School flourishes as an iSchool at Keio University, Tokyo. Last year two trunks bought at a yard sale were found to contain over 900 letters from Tokyo to his mother which candidly described his daily advantures.
    At the end of the Seminar, if time permits, I will also report on problems and progress replacing the former ASIST "Pioneers" webpages with a wikipedia-format historical biographical directory with international coverage.
    4:15 - 4:45 pm: Students' Progress Reports:
    Kui CAI: Impact of Climate Change on Food Insecurity and Micronutrient Deficiencies in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

    This report examines how climate change intensifies food insecurity and micronutrient deficiencies in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It discusses soil degradation, disrupted agricultural systems, and limited healthcare infrastructure, highlighting the urgent need for sustainable interventions to combat malnutrition and health challenges.
    Michael WANG: Error and Robustness of AI Text Detection Methods.
    As the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs become more and more powerful, the challenge of detecting AI generated text also becomes increasingly difficult. Research in this field has yielded several promising methods, while also raising concerns about error and robustness. These concerns must be addressed and resolved to enable practical and reliable applications of AI text detection.

Oct 11: Paul DUGUID: Branding Information.
    Economics has contributed significantly to the spread of modern notions of "information". To understand both how the field deployed ideas of information and how this deployment may have influenced the use of the concept more generally, this talk focuses on one topic, intellectual property, looking in particular at economists' accounts of trademarks. The talk investigates assumptions implicit in celebrated economic accounts of brands, and concludes that the fields's information-based assumptions significantly underestimate the complexity of both brands and information. Such an exploration is intended to help us understand more generally how we might address important questions around the authenticity and reliability of information.

Oct 18: Deirdre MULLIGAN: New Directions in Tech Governance.
    While congress continued to study the risks and possibilities of AI, the Biden-Harris Administration took bold action: driving agency actions to address risks to civil rights, equity, competition, economic opportunity, and national security; establishing new federal guidance to guide agency development, use, and procurement of AI, and a new AI Safety Institute; and boosting the capacity of government to use and regulate AI by bringing in new tech and tech-related talent and driving public and private investments in the growing public interest tech ecosystem. Drawing on my eighteen months of service in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden-Harris Administration, I will describe key AI initiatives and, drawing on my prior research, describe how these initiatives pave the way for the government to purposefully use technology to embed values or set policy—-what I call "governance-by-design"—-in a manner that supports fundamental democratic governance norms of intentional, deliberative, participatory, and expert public decision making, free from capture or caprice, and centers the public's rights and safety over private interests. Lastly, Mulligan will explain why these new directions in tech governance make growing the cultural and institutional supports for public service across the computing field should be an important shared national priority.
    Deidre Mulligan recently spent eighteen months as Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Oct 25: Clifford LYNCH: Stewardship and Developments in AI.
    This discussion will explore three separate but inter-related areas where developments in AI technologies, particularly generative AI systems, interact with digital preservation and stewardship in complex ways. This is very early and speculative work.
    1. Definitions of "open" AI components and systems. While there is a reasonable consensus on the definitions and practices associated with open source for traditional computer programs (and an understanding of how open source interacts with preservation and stewardship) a similar definition for AI has proven difficult and controversial, and there's been limited examination of preservation interactions.
    2. Goals of stewardship programs for generative AI. This follows on a discussion from last semester's seminar. It is not clear what aspects and impacts of the behavior of generative AI systems a stewardship program is trying to capture. I'll summarize last semester's discussion and conclusions and seek to test and perhaps re-validate them.
    3. Implications of chatbots designed to mimic individuals. There have been a series of (perhaps over-hyped) interesting developments here; I will summarize a few of these, including so-called "griefbots", and open a discussion of the potential stewardship implications of these computational objects or services.

Nov 1: Michael WANG: Benchmarking Error and Robustness of AI Text Detection Methods. Brief progress report.
    Nick MERRILL, Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity: Competition "Inside" the Cloud?
    A seldom-articulated (but commonly held) hypothesis is that cloud services are inherently monopolistic: they enjoy tremendous economies of scale, the benefits of which they pass on to consumers. If true, this hypothesis would predict competition (i.e., breaking up big cloud providers) to be an inappropriate remedy: since competition necessarily decreases the scale of the largest competitors, it would also decrease their economies of scale, and consumers would suffer in the form of higher prices, lower quality, or both. This talk will present evidence to the contrary. We find evidence that smaller providers can produce services competitive with larger ones, at least in certain markets. Our results imply that the market for cloud services is likely many markets and that competition may indeed prove to be an effective remedy to concentration for some of these markets. We seek to recover empirical means for discovering these market segments.
    Nick Merrill directs the Daylight Lab at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. For Nick see Nick Merrill.

Nov 8: Kora CAI: Maternal Nutrition and Child Health in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Trends and Key Indicators (2007, 2013 and 2014). Brief progress report.
    Guenther WAIBEL, California Digital Library: AI and Open Access.
    The university generates (scholars) and stewards (libraries) vast amounts of peer-reviewed scholarly content, and AI companies are increasingly motivated to incorporate this content into their products, including through agreements with academic publishers. Taking author consternation about these agreements as its point of departure, this talk will examine the intersection of AI, scholarly publishing and open access, and explore the implications of different publishing models on the university’s mission, self-interest and the public good.
    Günter Waibel is Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director at the California Digital Library, UC Office of the President. As one of the world’s largest digital libraries, the California Digital Library provides transformative digital library services, grounded in campus partnerships and extended through external collaborations, that amplify the impact of the libraries, scholarship, and resources of the University of California. More at Günter Waibel Staff Profile.

Nov 15: Cathy MARSHALL: What does it mean to turn every page in a digital era?
    In Working, journalist Robert Caro exhorts researchers and journalists to "turn every page." But what does it mean to turn every page in a digital era? There is little doubt that the ready availability of online digital data has brought about a sea change in research methods and results. Digital Humanities arose as a field with the introduction of new digital corpora (some extensively annotated) and more sophisticated analytic tools. Yet by now, the category itself and its attendant disciplinary distinctions are blurring. Other types of humanities researchers are taking increased advantage of online resources as well: results from traditional foregrounded sources like special collections and archives are being goosed by access to background resources like structured databases (e.g. long-term weather data), semi-structured text collections (e.g. large newspaper collections), and creatively repurposed content from web services. Using examples from fieldwork and my own ongoing collaborations, I will argue that these emerging categories of online resources will have knock-on effects for many aspects of research.

Nov 22: Final Progress Reports:
    Michael WANG: Benchmarking Error and Robustness of AI Text Detection Models.

    As the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs become more and more powerful, the challenge of detecting AI generated text also becomes increasingly difficult. Research in this field has yielded several promising methods, while also raising concerns about error and robustness. A well-constructed benchmark can provide more meaningful metrics to assess AI text detection models compared to self-reported accuracy scores, which often overestimate the true accuracy of AI text detection models.
    Cora CAI: Maternal Nutrition and Child Health in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Trends and Key Indicators (2007, 2013 and 2014).
    The project focuses on data visualization to analyze maternal nutrition and child health trends in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2007, 2013, 2014). Key indicators such as iron and vitamin A supplementation, child nutrition outcomes (stunting, anemia), and maternal health factors (body mass, depression, mortality) are explored. The analysis also includes socioeconomic factors like wealth index and decision-making, as well as environmental factors like flood events and food security.
    Suzanne WONES, University Librarian, will be rescheduled next semester.

Nov 29: No Seminar: Thanksgiving.

Dec 6: Last scheduled Seminar meeting: Clifford LYNCH.

    The Seminar will resume in the spring semester.
Spring 2024 schedule and summaries.