Along with one other inaugural recipient (Dr. Gil-Garcia), at the 22nd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2021) the award of “Fellow of the Digital Government Society,” which honors exceptional and groundbreaking contributions to the study domain of Digital Government, was conferred to Hans Jochen Scholl. The Digital Government Society, of which Jochen was a founding member in 2005, and for which he served as the Third President (2009-2010), is an association of hundreds of scholars worldwide. In his acceptance speech Jochen urged his colleagues to focus their research during times of increasingly challenged democracies worldwide more frequently on “problematic outcomes” of digital government, which he characterized as Type A (desirable, but not successful) and Type B (not desirable, but successful). He maintained that “some of the technically best, yet most invasive, most suppressive, and albeit most ‘successful' digital government systems are not committed to democracy in any shape or form but rather support and foster autocracy and dictatorships.” Such “successes” in Digital Government Jochen characterized as extremely undesirable and highly problematic. His remarks were met with great applause from the dg.o 2021 audience.
Tanu Mitra was awarded Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award at ICWSM 2021. This award is presented annually during the AAAI ICWSM conference to a young researcher who has distinguished themself through innovative research in the area of computational social science in the early stage of their independent research career.
Correction: Rachel Franz's contribution was omitted from last week's Shout Outs: Rachel Franz and Jacob O. Wobbrock have been awarded a Social Experiences in VR Environments program grant of $74,947 by Facebook for Rachel's research on Recommending VR Interaction Techniques for Users with Limited Mobility.
Shruti Phadke and Tanu Mitra had a paper accepted to CSCW 2021: Shruti Phadke and Tanushree Mitra. 2021. “Educators, Solicitors, Flamers, Motivators, Sympathizers: Characterizing Roles in Online Extremist Movements.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Vol. 5 (CSCW3). New York: ACM Press. To appear.
Stacey Wedlake spoke on a panel, “Digital Inclusion During COVID-19,” as part of the Tech and Social Justice Workshop. The panel and workshop support the National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary project that aims to bring together scholars, policymakers, practitioners and citizens concerned with how technology might be used to enhance social justice and better support marginalized populations.
The UW Office of Global Affairs launched a new Interactive Global Publications dashboard this week. The project was led by Jason Portenoy and Jevin West. The publications data in the research and publications visualization is powered by the DataLab.