Wed, 22 Oct 2008
Society for the History of Technology
At the recent Society for the History of Technology conference, held this year in Lisbon, I presented a paper called "Fixing things that can never be broken: Software maintenance as heterogeneous engineering." At some point in the near future I hope to transform this short essay into a full-length paper. For the time being, I here is the conference version.
category: /research
Thu, 17 Jul 2008
Gender and Computing Revisited
A PDF version of my paper from the recent Gender and Computer conference at the Charles Babbage Institute is now available online.
category: /research
Wed, 23 Apr 2008
Gender and Computing Conference
On May 30, 2008 the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota will present a day-long public conference devoted to a much-needed examination of gender and computing. While the National Science Foundation and other policy actors have devoted immense resources to increasing women's participation in computing, over the past two decades there has been a striking drop in women's participation in computing education and a corresponding tail-off in the U.S. workforce. Clearly, an important "missing piece" is yet to be discovered. This international conference examines gender and the diverse uses of computing in offices, libraries, schools, mass media, and the computing profession.
I will be presenting a paper called "Making Programming Masculine."
Registration for the conference is open until 20 May 2008. More information can be found here.
category: /research
Wed, 30 Jan 2008
History of Computing - Software for Europe
Just got back from the SOFT-EU Workshop in Grenoble. The workshop was part of a larger project called History of Computing - Software for Europe, which is in turn part of the larger
category: /research
Tue, 10 May 2005
Is Chess the Drosophila of AI? Exploring the Moral Economy of Artificial Intelligence
The title of this paper derives from a quote by the legendary computer scientist John McCarthy: " In 1965, the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said, 'Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence.' However, computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies.
McCarthy and his colleagues in AI this metaphor was appropriate because they saw chess, like the drosophilia, as an ideal vehicle through which to reveal objective truths about the natural world. Historians of science, however, view the drosophila from a different perspective. Building on the work of Robert Kohler, this paper explores the moral economy of the AI community and the unique ways in which the experimental technology of chess shaped the program of AI research in the decade of the 1970s.
category: /research
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